The interview process was very thorough and rigorous. The company truly chooses the best out of the best and expects you to show up prepared and to be your most authentic self. It was tedious as we had to pass multiple interviews and send over a list of design tests to prove our skill. Nonetheless, the interviewer was very personable and accommodating and was very active and communicative throughout the entire process.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Jan 2022
Interview
Last December, I got an email from their recruiter asking me if I was interested in Canva. I was glad to give it try.
The first round is the coding interview. TBH, I didn't do very well but I could think of a better solution - `Interval Tree` but I couldn't remember too much about details. After the interview, I found I had just implemented IntervalTree based on RedBlackTree 1.5 years ago. Anyway, I still had the chance to move on to the following interview: 3 Technical interviews + 1 management interview.
I had these interviews last month. Overall I love these technical interviews as they are very practical. I screwed up in one of the coding interviews. Other feedbacks were all good. Particularly, I made a very very stupid mistake. Basically, I have to implement something with the native dom event. I just need to get the input value when the event is triggered. But I was using `KeyDown` instead of `KeyUp`. So I couldn't get the value correctly, I notice the problem and thought of a workaround - using the timer. The interviewer was not satisfied with it. He reminded me of using another event. I tried `KeyPress` but I didn't try `KeyUp` as at the time I thought I was using the correct one. I wasted a lot of time on that and felt the reminder from him was not helping at all but made me more nervous.
When I have more time to reflect on that interview, I think I should be able to notice that stupid mistake very quickly because I understand what happened.
Maybe sometimes I lack a bit of luck. That day I had a headache and took some painkillers caused by Covid-19 before the interview. My mind was gone blank under pressure.
I could get instant feedback after the interview.
BTW, I had an unsuccessful interview with Canva 4 years ago. This time the interviews were not that challenging as I was not asked to implement Virtual Dom.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Canva (Sydney) in Feb 2022
Interview
So after going through the interview I understand why their interview process is so negatively rated on Glassdoor.
The interviews are really easy. For me it was 4 rounds.
I honestly would recommend anyone not to go ahead with their interview process until and unless you really want to work for the company. There is no learning involved and at end you feel that your time was wasted.
I got the rejection after a week. When I asked for specific feedback what I received was vague statements like:
1. Could've been better in discussions.
2. Could've been better in managing time.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. A screening round which was an easy machine coding round.
2. A algorithmic round which was an hour discussion on BFS.
3. A machine coding round to fix tests and discuss design around user experiments.
4. An algorithmic discussion regarding conway's game of life.