I would like to share my front-end interview experience at Thoughtspot. I am assuming you must be knowing about the company that’s why you are here reading this article :). Well, let’s start with the recruiter call. One fine day I received a message on LinkedIn from a Thoughtspot recruiter asking If I would be interested in exploring the opportunity they are open to. I was literally exploring that time but I didn’t have any idea about Thoughtspot. I googled about it and found it a great company to work with.
It was a Yes from my side and I shared my contact number and resume with the recruiter. We had a short call after that, kind of a screening call. The interviews were scheduled later based on availability and they were really flexible with it.
There were 4 rounds in total which 1st two rounds are machine coding rounds followed by a system design round and then a managerial round. I would not be exaggerating If I say it was the best interview experience for me. I have also attended Google’s interviews and the Thoughtspot interview process was almost similar to the former one.
Since my profile was selected for Front end engineer role, so I was asked questions related to the front-end only. I am mentioning this because many companies don’t understand this and they start asking for something else that either we have never worked at or we will never work with. Coming back to interview rounds, all the interviews were scheduled on Zoom because WFH was going on.
Interview rounds –
- Technical coding round 1
In the first round which was the coding round, I was given a problem similar to Google search autocomplete. The time given was 1 hour. There were 2 interviewers on the call and they were really friendly and tried their best to make me comfortable. It didn’t feel like I am giving the interview, it was more like we are solving a problem together. I cleared that round. Another round got scheduled after 2 days. - Technical coding round 2
In the second round which was also a coding round, the problem given was based on javascript promise chaining and it was a really good question. Again the interviewer was very friendly and gave proper hints on the edge cases which I missed. I am repeating that this doesn’t happen with every company’s interviews. I didn’t know one concept which was needed to solve that problem, the interviewer allowed me to read about it for 5 mins, and then I can implement it. But yes, these all things happened within the scheduled time range of 1 hour. I completed the solution and consequently, I cleared the round. 3rd round got scheduled after a few days. - System design round – UI
It was the system design round. Since I never had any experience with front-end system design rounds I was equally nervous and excited at the same time. I prepared for it but still didn’t have much idea about what exactly was going to be asked. There is very less material available on the internet related to front-end system design interviews but now I had a basic idea about what it is. The interview started and the interviewer was on the other side ready to throw a question at me.
Again, this guy was very humble and soft-spoken too, and started with a very normal introduction about himself. The problem was on the table and I had to design a UI for an enterprise chat application, eg. Slack. Basically, we were discussing all things required to build the UI for the given application like layout structure, required UI components, UI interactions, APIs we might need, and the optimization techniques. It was a great interview round and a wonderful experience. - Managerial round
This was the final round and there were discussions mostly about the company culture, product demo, and the compensation. The engineering manager was very humble too. I was amazed by the company culture and the product demo. Thoughtspot is indeed an amazing product.
After all the rounds were completed, HR called me to wait for a few days since there was an internal discussion going on about my candidature. She got back to me and informed me that they are going forward with my candidature. I thanked her and accepted the offer letter. I joined Thoughtspot, Bangalore, India office.
It’s been 8 months in Thoughtspot now and I can truly say that It was one of my best decisions to be a part of such an organization. I am building a great product along with my peers and really enjoying every bit of it along with a lot of learning.
I have seen many “front-end developers” who don’t know to write proper HTML/CSS and try to ignore that. Please don’t do that, give equal importance to HTML/CSS as much as you give to Javascript. I would advise my fellow front-end developers to learn the basics of javascript before learning its frameworks. If you give equal importance to all three, you will end up cracking several interviews easily. All the best 🙂
Also read –
Sigtuple Interview Experience – OffCampus
What I did to become a software engineer?
