The Test Double interviewing process

Interviewing is rarely anyone’s favorite activity—it can be high pressure with high stakes. That’s why at Test Double, we have built a process with a goal to provide good experiences to every single candidate regardless of the outcome. We want you to have a detailed understanding of what it is like to interview with us before the process even begins.

Bridge Agent

Each candidate should be given every possible opportunity to be successful at Test Double. This is why we created the Bridge Agent role. They will review your application and schedule an introductory call. The agent will get to know you and answer any questions that you have. Their primary responsibility is to be an advocate for you during the entire process. No matter where you are in the process, your bridge agent would absolutely love for you to reach out with questions, comments, feedback, or advice. They are on your team from day one.

Consulting interview

Our agents have experience with all sorts of challenging teams and situations. Our consulting interview is an opportunity to discuss how you would approach some of these sorts of nontechnical problems. When problems arise, our industry is quick to write code instead of having conversations and building shared understanding. We are looking for people who share our passions for mentorship, building trust, and helping teams provide significant business value.

Technical interview

Our clients often look to us for help building, changing, and scaling complex systems in all sorts of programming languages. The technical interview is an opportunity to hear your thoughts on some of these challenges. We are looking for teammates with deep understanding of at least one programming environment as well as a breadth of experience across different types of projects, architectures, and teams. You’ll be paired with an interviewer whose focus will be discussing your technical approach to the sorts of client situations we encounter. These discussions will generally be focused on higher level concepts such as maintainability, architectural choices, testing, and software delivery processes. Additionally, each question has a follow-up to understand your appreciation for the human impact that technical decisions have on your fellow developers, your team, and your users. We will not be asking you trivia questions or evaluating the complexity of sorting algorithms.

Take home

It’s time to dive into some code! We will give you an exercise to work through in one of your more comfortable programming languages. We ask that you spend no more than two hours exploring the problem and coming up with a solution. Asking for your time is not a decision we take lightly. By setting a two hour limit, our desire is to ensure we are not giving an advantage to candidates that have more free time. We will schedule a review session once you’ve had a chance to complete the exercise. We will ask you to walk us through your solution, explain the decisions that you made, and expand on next steps you’d take. Our objective for this step is not for you to finish the exercise. Instead, we really want to focus on the decisions you made and the approach you took as well as your ability to discuss and explain it.

Pairing interview

We work remotely and spend lots of time pairing with each other and our clients on video calls. We will work through an exercise together in this interview. It will probably be in a different language than your take home review. Just like the take home, the objective of the pairing interview is not to finish the exercise. We’d like to get a sense of what it’s like to work with you and our focus will be on communication. We hope that you’ll ask questions and use whatever resources and tools you’d be using day to day at your clients.

Offer extended or “Not yet” with feedback

After you finish your pairing interview, your bridge agent will be in touch within a few days with our decision. No matter the outcome, we promise to provide clear and actionable feedback. When we aren’t ready to extend an offer just yet, we will tell you exactly what we felt was missing and encourage you to talk to us again after you’ve had a chance to grow in those areas.

Applying

We want to improve the way the world builds software and we would absolutely love your help. We promise to be objective, honest, and respectful during this process. If this post has piqued your interest, please read our mission, job description, and application form. Our Bridge Agents are standing by to greet you!