🧑‍🏫 Unacademy Interview Experience - Software Engineer, Web

#career #webdev #javascript #beginners

I have joined Unacademy as Software Engineer, Web. I am a final-year BTech student. I will be graduating next month or so.

In this article - I will share how I got the opportunity, interview experience, tips, and the resources that helped me.

🐣 First Contact

It all started when one of my articles went viral. The article in question: https://dev.to/rajatetc/js-interview-checklist-part-1-basics-10k6. I had shared the article on LinkedIn. An Unacademy recruiter liked my article. So, I cold DM'ed him for a chance to interview.

To my delight - he said that he has already checked out my portfolio - resume, projects, and articles and will get back to me if any relevant openings come up.

After one week or so - I did a follow-up. To my good fortune - they had started hiring for a junior role. The recruiter explained everything related to the rounds over a call and scheduled the first round.

🥊 The Rounds

JS Fundamentals (~ 1 hr)
Frontend with React (~ 1 hr)
Senior Engineering Manager (~ 30 m)
Culture ( ~ 30 m)

Platform: Google Meet

Coding Environment: CodeSandbox

✔️ JS Fundamentals

It started with a simple intro. Then we quickly jumped to JS questions. The questions revolved around the concepts of closures, setTimeout, this, async/await, and promises.

For the output-based questions: the interviewer first gave a simple question and then added more complexity to it.

There was no DS/Algo but there were questions like writing the Promise.all() method from scratch to test problem-solving skills. The interviewer gave hints or directed me whenever I got stuck.

🌋 Frontend with React

This took place after a few days. There were two interviewers in this round. One was just shadowing the whole process.

The questions ranged from basics like what is React, state, hooks, class components to coding a counter, cleanups, and custom hooks.

In the end - the interviewer also asked JS questions on this, objects, new operator, and the event loop. There were questions on performance optimizations like debounce and throttle as well.

Take-home assignment: After this round - there was supposed to be a take-home assignment. But I shared the projects I had built and they were impressed enough to skip it.

After two days, the next two rounds took place on the same day.

🧑🏻‍💼 Senior Engineering Manager

This round was with employee #9 at Unacademy. Now, we are 5000+.

It was more of a discussion on how I approach problems, team dynamics, and culture fit. It started with technical questions on what I had done in my previous internship and optimizations in my projects.

Questions related to culture fit like what worked in the previous internship and what didn't were peppered in between. He also asked what I would like to work on.

👘 Culture

It was again more of a discussion. Questions related to behavior and situations like how will you react if the project you were working on for a few months gets shelved.

All the interviewers were very friendly. At no point - it felt like an interrogation. They guided me whenever I got stuck.

⚙️ What Worked For me

Building in public. All my projects are hosted online. They have proper readMEs and posted on relevant platforms like Linkedin. This caught their attention in the first place and allowed me to skip the take-home assignment.
Doubled down on strengthening my fundamental knowledge of JS and React. I had also prepped for CSS but that didn't come in my round 2. This helped me tackle the coding questions in the rounds.
Thoroughly researched the company - I had gone through their leadership principles, tech blog, videos, recent initiatives, and so on. I had also checked their product - analyzed the UI/UX and checked the lighthouse report for the website. I got positive feedback from every interviewer and they were impressed that I knew so much about the company.
Beforehand I had also prepared my intro, spoken out loud when coding during the process, and asked specific questions at the end. I also reached out to friends and mentors to make sure that I am not over-preparing or headed in the wrong direction.

Finally, I had an overall positive and high-energy approach to everything.

📚 Resources

In my journey to learn web development, I have perused many resources - ranging from documentation, videos, courses to articles, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts.

Here, I share some of the key resources:

Last but not the least, a shoutout to the 🚀 roc8 community for helping in the interview preparation.

If you have any questions - you can comment down below or DM me on Twitter.