I joined Box as an Engineer in 2008, when we were 5 engineers.
Grew rapidly with the company and was most recently a Director in Engineering, managing multiple teams full of amazing people. Left after 6 years, to fulfill my entrepreneurial dreams. Box was my career-launching company. (And it is, for many other engineers). I have also worked at Microsoft and eBay.
But that’s not very interesting for this story. What is really interesting, is that along the way, I had the incredible opportunity to help our technical teams grow from 5 to 250 engineers. This meant living and breathing the interviewing machine exploring all its nooks and corners, and ups and downs.
Box was also a company that constantly questioned and improved its interviewing processes. That relentless focus helped us hire great engineers.
I noticed however, that despite all that attention, hiring took an unreasonably long amount of time and much agony. We’d go through hundreds of resumes, countless phone screens and countless onsite interviews for each open position.
That bothered me to no end. If most of our interviews were of reasonably average difficulty, our scoring method was well-structured, and our interviewers well-trained, why would only a few candidates clear our interviews? Yet, in the end, our pass rate was so low.
I dug into this extensively. I realized that while everyone was hard-working and very smart in their own way, they vastly under-estimated the amount of preparation it would take to clear programming interviews at top companies. They only had a vague idea of what to expect, and did not have enough practice to solve interview problems under time-pressure. Their daily jobs or schools did not prepare them for handling interviews.
I found more evidence of this from the career-coaching I did on the side (pro-bono). Many candidates would even want to change their careers, thinking they were not good at programming, simply because they weren't able to crack interviews.
I knew there had to be a better way to help candidates prepare for interviews. Something more focused than online sites loaded with a thousand random questions and equally random answers. Something more modern and interactive than books. Something more comprehensive, rigorous and deliberate, with immediate feedback, that helps you push yourselves hard. After all, getting into a good company improves entire trajectory of your life.
Interview Kickstart is my attempt to address that gap. I’m focusing on it full-time. Looking forward to helping you nail your next interview.
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