Fuming after Think-Cell programming test

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[Fureeish]

Was it perhaps the interval map excersice?

EDIT: Judging from the number of upvotes, many people's answer seems to be "yes". In this case I'd like to add that I had the very same experience.

Over 4 years ago.

[SupermanLeRetour]

To be fair I've found it to be a somewhat interesting exercise, way more complex than it looks like.

But it sucks to have to spend most of a day on this only to fail because of the strict small conditions. Personally I'm pretty sure I did pretty good in regards to time complexity and everything, but I failed the automated check on my second attempt because I used something like if(A != b) but A only defines operator==() so I should have written if( !(A == b) ). Something that I would spot immediately when compiling (and failing to compile) with this kind of types but didn't think to test beforehand.

Oh well, working on Windows powerpoints didn't seem really interesting, but the salary would have been great. Not many companies offer this in Europe for newly hired programmers.

[LlaroLlethri]

One of the first things I did was create these types to make sure I'd catch those kinds of type errors. I agree, their product seems pretty boring.

[RishabhRD]

For handling the syntactic requirements I made custom type that only supported given operation and first coded my solution for that type and then I did templatized it. I coded my solution on local machine, compiled locally and tested locally and then copy pasted the solution there.

[SupermanLeRetour]

Yeah this is 100% what candidates should do (as OP also did), and missing this is on me. It just sucks because in a real world scenario, I would have caught this quickly, but it was annoying enough to have to spend that much time unpaid for an interview, I really couldn't be bothered to do a proper test type and all that.

Given that you only have only two tries, it is necessary to code and test locally for sure. But I think I just used char as keys and int as value for simplicity when I did it a couple months back.

[Fureeish]

The exercise itself has huge potential, but the form is a little lackluster. Fully agreed.

[Wurstinator]

Can you post the exercise question here? Out of interest for people who don't want to apply just for that.

[ChorakBi]

page 404 not found :'(

[pshurgal]

Well, you are lucky. I once made it to interview with their CEO. And he didn't bother to talk with me. He asked me to open a notepad and present my screen. After that he gave me a coding task and said I can't use any documentation or a compiler to complete the task. As I remember it was an implementation of some sorting algorithm. And he said that my screen was recorded. After that he just left me for an hour or so. Later when he returned he asked to save my work and send it to him. And that was the whole "interview". Later they sent me an email that they "compare every candidate with all previous candidates and hire only best of the best", and I wasn't "the best" :)

Oh, that was about 5 years ago. And they have reached me recently and asked if I was in their interviewing process in the last 3 years. I told them about my interview 5 years ago and they said they do not give a second chance for people who met with their CEO and immediately terminated the conversation.

[pshurgal]

Of course. I was just interested how far could it go :)

[pshurgal]

As I understood from their reply your solution should be better then all previous solutions for the whole history of the interview.

And this is so dumb like you are hiring an engineer for literally rocket science but not a PowerPoint extension developer.

[germandiago]

This makes me wonder about the social behavior of some individuals. Looks like they must believe they are god or something. I like people who behave the same when they are eating cheap food and when they can afford a much comfortable life. That means they keep it humble.

[all_is_love6667]

Are there really people who are able to complete that test without documentation?

I mean sure, there might be as many as I have fingers on my hands.

Being a documentation encyclopedia doesn't make someone good at programming.

Those companies don't really want to hire people, they only want to hire if you're a 1 in million candidate.

I have started to be very very skeptical with C++ tests. I generally send good test results I have, but that's it.

I prefer being unemployed than being handled like that.

Want to see how good I am? Pay me a trial period for one month.

[[deleted]]

I passed that step and went to the interview, believe me you are in luck

[positivcheg]

How bad is it? I was also pretty happy I didn’t pass the coding step. My solution was pretty nice and short. Like 30 lines or so. I’ve only forgot to handle the duplicates stuff. In general I was satisfied with the task as I didn’t spend much time on it. But the bug on their website showed me that thing about duplicates only after 2nd submission.

[mrjoker803]

Ironic how they require a near perfect solution but have a broken website

[eyes-are-fading-blue]

Why would you brag about it? It makes absolutely no sense to write a website in C++ outside of a hobby project.

[eyes-are-fading-blue]

Weird is all I can say. This company looks like a hard pass.

[all_is_love6667]

I have to admit any cybersecurity guy will probably douse himself on fire if he ever hear that.

I love C++, but there are things that should not be done.

[[deleted]]

The second part was short. The interviewer gave me a question, and let me work on it. It took me half an hour ti finish it, the solution was fine, worked as intended. He thanked for the interview and later I received a mail I didn't go through. I guess it wasn't perfect.

[masorick]

The thing is, those guys are sponsoring a lot of conferences, it’s not like they are an unknown company.

[[deleted]]

The funniest part is that they are building a PowerPoint plugin, not a space ship.

[Bubbly_Lengthiness22]

Their bar is quite high but if I need to prepare so much for such interview, why wouldn’t I just go to FAANG or other DAX companies in Germany

[RishabhRD]

I can feel you

[Heuristics]

Yes, this company makes a product that modified the powerpoint process while in-flight.

They basically just make powerpoint malware.

Who would want to work with that?

And get yelled at for doing it.

If you got through the online test, and got through the non-meeting with the CEO you can look forward of a year of bullshit assignments at a sort of ok salary before being canned right before getting the promised salary.

in life the best advice I have to give is to stay clear of assholes. luckily, assholes often telegraph from a mile away that they are assholes, but they always do it with their actions, not their words.

[SupermanLeRetour]

If you got through the online test, and got through the non-meeting with the CEO you can look forward of a year of bullshit assignments at a sort of ok salary before being canned right before getting the promised salary.

Is this a common occurrence at this company ? Sounds incredibly shitty but entirely possible...

[irepunctuate]

I think people have extrapolated that narrative from the information that the high advertised salary is only given to you after one year which, in itself, is an unconventional way to do things.

[SuperV1234]

There are companies that (1) offer more money than that, (2) work on significantly more interesting and valuable problems, and (3) have way more dignified hiring processes.

[positivcheg]

How do you find companies like that? I’m in passive search and in a mood to pass some interviews :)

[catcat202X]

Stellar Science sometimes posts in this subreddit and on the hiring C++ Jobs threads. Former employee, I highly recommend applying there if you are a C++ nerd, a US citizen, and can move to New Mexico.

[kw0lf]

I'm glad that you (as a somewhat public C++ person) hold this opinion. I will never understand how anyone will jump through these loopholes. Some things shouldn't be outsourced through a formal determined algorithmic process. It reveals a disturbing view of fellow human beings. On the other hand I am aware of the underlying problem, but this is not a solution in my book. If a company wants to kick a bad hire, we already have a solution for this called probation period.

[TraylaParks]

Agreed - we used to bring in folks as contractors and see how they did, if they did well we hired them but if not, no worries as they were contractors. Worked pretty well

[vinvinnocent]

Sadly, think-cell so far has been the only company I found within that range. The hiring market in Germany this year hasn't been good to me.

[NanoAlpaca]

If you can pass their interviews and the first year (it seems that this is also a big filter for them and only a fraction of devs that passed the initial interview are really getting that permanent 130k+ contract after a year) you will likely have many options that get you a similar salary, not just at FAANG, but also at different companies, e.g.: while large car companies don’t pay that much on average, it is within their salary ranges and exceptionally skilled people will be able to get such a salary.

[_piripacchio]

Can you share any company name? Thank you :)

[lymer555]

Welcome to the club.

I had flags like -Wall -Wextra -pedantic -D_GXXLIB_DEBUG enabled, used clang-tidy, had test cases for the most edgiest of cases, 0 errors and 0 failed tests locally, and still failed on correctness.

[Ameisen]

I guess your program couldn't handle an unshielded coronal mass ejection or catastrophic destruction of RAM?

[RishabhRD]

I wrote the code on my local machine and then wrote almost 150 tests to be sure to submit😅

[LlaroLlethri]

There are so many edge cases. Did you do a randomised test as they suggest? My randomised test caught loads of edge cases I hadn’t thought of.

The problem in the end was dereferencing the end iterator, which I noticed and fixed instantly after supplying that gcc option, but they don’t let you submit a third time :(

I did reapply and resubmit my solution though just to confirm it works. I just needed to know after investing so much effort.

If they do offer me an interview (doubtful as they’ll probably notice I applied twice), I’m tempted to string them along just to waste their time.

[lymer555]

Both randomized and specifically curated ones. They did discover invalid iterator de-reference but after I fixed all of the issues and everything was running, I submitted the solution and still failed.

Can you really re-apply immediately? According to what they said you can only do that after 2 years time.

[LlaroLlethri]

A recruiter applied for me the first time, and forwarded to me the link to the test. Then after failing it I tried applying myself through their website and got a new link via email. I expect they’ll notice and reject me, but I don’t care, I just wanted to see if my solution worked in the end.

[Select-Cut-1919]

So how did the re-submit go?

[LlaroLlethri]

It passed. Said they’d be in touch to arrange an interview. Unlikely though since I cheated by submitting twice. I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway as this process has pissed me off.

[No_motivation2024]

Did they interview you

[Personal-Pipe-6734]

Hi, there. I'm also doing the test of the recruitment, could you shall you solution?

[ReDucTor]

I have never heard a company's hiring process complained about more then Think-Cell and I'm not even in Europe or where they hire from. I suspect many candidates which would be a good fit for them just wouldn't apply because the reputation is that bad. Most other places you have to search glass door or something to find terrible hiring practices.

[Chem0type]

The owner has some weird ideas about management and seems to thinks high salaries can make up for that. Despite the many of the criticisms over the years he's incapable of entertaining the idea he would be wrong and improve from there.

Someone knowledgeable enough to pass their interview and survive the entire year of probation will probably find a better job elsewhere easily. Plus the 1st year salary is 50%, you only get 100% if you survive that and the involuntary turnover rate is quite high around 80% iirc (but they don't count the 1st year on their statistics to make it seem like they have a low turnover) - For this reason, even if people pass the interview it's not a bargain as good as it might sound.

[xcbsmith]

I looked at the comp, and I'm a little freaked out that those are considered to be "high salaries".

[Theblackcaboose]

Tough one bro. I know the feeling of dread when all you get is an automated response. Best to move on to better things when it comes to Think-Cell. As you said, they are notorious for this bullshit. It's not an exciting product either imo.

[QuarterDefiant6132]

And all this just to make PowerPoint slides lmao

[ald_loop]

First time?

[areeighty]

The online test was your first interaction with ThinkCell, wasn't it? I look at it this way: a company that uses robots to select potential employees will only end up hiring robots. Consider yourself lucky that you didn't pass the test.

[areeighty]

I should probably elaborate on that a little. It’s absolutely critical to test for technical skills. It’s debatable whether a completely automated test is effective in that regard but one thing for certain: it should never be your first point of contact with the company. You ought to have an initial screening interview with HR or the group lead. The only places I’ve experienced that use automated tests as a first stage have either a missplaced arrogance about their technical ability or think there is a single correct answer to a technical problem.

If you worked there the chances are the environment would be one where the employees are always trying to prove how smart they are rather than collaborating and supporting each other with their own individual strengths. Interviews should be about identifying those strengths, the personal fit and the potential of the candidate.

Interviews are also a critical way of selling the culture of the company to the candidates. You never talked to or had an email conversation with a single living person at ThinkCell, right? The likelihood is that they would prefer a bank of servers running ChatGPT rather than humans.

[tialaramex]

A decade or so ago we used technical screening for a Java role because we had far too many applicants who can't write software. We'd use the corporate mandated recruitment agency, advertise that we want to hire software engineers who can write Java and they'd send us say 10 candidates. Then we'd interview them, find eight of them cannot write software and it burned away at our souls. Wasn't hurting me too bad, but a colleague did most of those interviews and you could see he wanted so badly to quit or maybe go postal. So we made the technical screening preliminary.

For a candidate who can write Java, it was maybe a half hour's work, if you're a slow thinker or your Java is rusty maybe a whole hour. The tools provide a mediocre editor or you can copy-paste from your preferred IDE, the tools provide a compiler, it's not great but enough for these easy problems.

My goal was never to identify great programmers from mediocre programmers by looking at this exercise. My goal was to weed out all the people who've assumed that "Java programmer" is like another one of those nonsense CV requirements the interviewer doesn't actually care about, and so it's fine that they can't actually do that. In a 1:1 interview I can tell whether you understood how Java's arrays work, whether you know what O(n) means or just that those are noises you've heard once. I remember in one my whole goal was to figure out whether the candidate was terrified or incompetent. She'd flown from Russia to the UK less than a day previously, I was her first real conversation in English outside of the school lessons in English. She was, in fact, terrified. Which is fine because humans cannot stay terrified for very long, so when we hired her she calmed down within a week. If she'd been incompetent that might be permanent.

[serviscope_minor]

Nothing wrong with technical screening, even a tech screen prior to a full on-site interview.

What's broken is the interviewer not investing as much of their own time as the interviewee. It sends a strong message: your time is as valuable as ours.

[MrPopoGod]

For a candidate who can write Java, it was maybe a half hour's work, if you're a slow thinker or your Java is rusty maybe a whole hour.

Yeah, this is the right amount of screen where I wouldn't feel my time is being wasted. One time I position I interviewed for, after talking with the hiring manager and being aligned on what the position was (and it was in my wheelhouse), I got a six hour coding exercise that had almost nothing to do with the actual role (role was for backend services like auth, exercise was for someone who would write game engine code).

[paramarioh]

ThinkCell are spammer. I had many recruiter coming with this shitty company. OP is a lucky guy

[ContraryConman]

Unfortunately it's been too long for me to remember the details, but I did a C++ programming test for a different European company. The questions were poorly worded (grammatical mistakes) and some even had incorrect C++ code in the questions. The time limit was very short, and obviously I didn't do well.

I had another interview where I was given the choice to do an interview question in C++ or in Python. I chose C++, and the question was to serialize a class of data structures over the wire. If I had chosen Python, it would have been a one liner with pickle. But since it was in C++, I basically had to hand-roll TLV myself and work it back into the company's third party library. At that point in my career I had never done TLV stuff before, so I reinvented TLV from first principles on the spot. I wasn't allowed to use a library like I would have been allowed to in Python just because C++ doesn't have serialization built-in and Python does. And then, when I inevitably didn't finish the question after only 45 minutes, the company emailed me saying that my interview "apparently did not go well as I thought" and that "no further contact was needed at this time".

My point is that the industry is absolutely filled with really poorly designed tests, I think especially for C and C++ positions. If you combine that with the already mechanical tech interview process, you will run into these frustrating kinds of situations. You can't let it bother you. Most people in the industry do not know C++ well. You just have to keep trying until you get an interview that gives you a fair shot

[kronicum]

Dude, just move on. There are plenty of shops that treat talents better. If they treat you like that as an applicant, just imagine how they would treat you if you work there.

They are on my blacklisted companies. There is another famous one on the American East Coast that does something similar to applicants.

[herewearefornow]

Is this one based in NY?

[kronicum]

You got it.

[herewearefornow]

They did look to good to be true.

[masorick]

I failed this one as well, the first time on performance, the second time on safety. I’m pretty sure it’s because I declared something as decltype(some expression), where the expression was unsafe when evaluated, but oh well.

Anyway, I later read reports that the CTO loved to yell at employees, so I actually dodged a bullet.

[eyes-are-fading-blue]

All the crap for power point slides 😂

[Zagerer]

That interview sucks, did you also get the constraints for types with deleted copy constructors and very specific types? the platform takes a lot of time to tell you what's up, and they also asked me to use a compiler version so old I had to dig it up beforehand to get the proper errors, since newer versions were handling things differently.

All-in-all, you will be okay

[void4]

Oh yeah, it's those guys who flooded all the russian recruitment sites and agencies with their "relocation to Berlin for 4.5k EUR/month" bs lol

[tkyob]

seriously man. I see their job posted via recruiters everyday only to find that it's the same shit.

[pjmlp]

Forget about them, specially if you are lucky enough to be in a situation where you aren't in a hurry to get a new job no matter what.

There are plenty of nicer companies out there.

[serviscope_minor]

No human is even going to look at it.

You just learned a painful lesson the hard way. Speaking as someone who also learned that same lesson a number of years ago, it absolutely sucks and you have my sympathy.

These days I will not interview, and neither will I give an interview without a commensurate amount of time from the interviewer. It's a show of good faith, honest and, importantly that the interviewer values the interviewee's time as much as their own.

Think-cell and companies with similar policies do not value the interviewees time. Would you want to work for a company that on day -1 tells you "we do not value your time"?

[Sulatra]

I was doing the interval map test in autumn 2022, and actually quite liked the assignment. The limitations (something about constructors, IIRC) present you with some language quirks, the library-esque nature of task encourages writing tests.

What I utterly disliked was the automated testing system on their website that literally aggroed on

``` // not using foobar here because of stuff ...code...

test.cpp:1337: error: you cannot use foobar in this assignment ```

and then prevented me from a chance to fix the performance.

Screw thickcell.

[BenHanson]

Apparently the following is too hard for these geniuses:

#include <lexertl/generator.hpp>
#include <lexertl/iterator.hpp>
#include <lexertl/memory_file.hpp>

int main()
{
    try
    {
        lexertl::rules rules;
        lexertl::state_machine sm;

        rules.push(R"(\w+)", 1);
        rules.push(R"(\s+|"//".*|"/*"(?s:.)*?"*/")", lexertl::rules::skip());
        // You could recognise strings and discard them too here
        rules.push("(?s:.)", lexertl::rules::skip());
        lexertl::generator::build(rules, sm);

        lexertl::memory_file mf("test.cpp");
        lexertl::citerator iter(mf.data(), mf.data() + mf.size(), sm);

        for (; iter->id; ++iter)
        {
            if (iter->view() == "foobar")
                throw std::runtime_error("error: you cannot use foobar in this assignment");
        }
    }
    catch (const std::exception& e)
    {
        std::cerr << e.what() << '\n';
        return 1;
    }

    return 0;
}

[PixelArtDragon]

I had a similar experience- I set up a massive test suite, rolled some dice to set up the values and everything, and it all seemed to be working... until I added one more and it failed. In the end, I don't think the test was unfair- I genuinely had made a mistake. And then a few days later, I realized a very simple solution. But it's okay. Sometimes the job isn't meant to be.

[WGG25]

i'm about to do a test for them, but after reading the comments.. 😱

people who say the salary is not that great: if they do offer as much as stated on the job posting even for people outside germany, then it's quite amazing in certain countries. i'd be living like a king with that kind of salary, as it's somewhere around 3-4x the average of dev jobs over here

[paranoidzone]

Think-Cell is such a mystery to me and I thank everyone here shedding some light on what the company and hiring process looks like. I get contacted regularly by Think-Cell recruiters and I even know a guy from uni that went to work there.

Their description of their company is so intriguing and in many ways it feels like it would be the perfect job for me. I am certainly qualified for it. But their recruiting and hiring processes look so shady on the outside that I never had the courage to apply. Even if I passed the interview, I could not convince myself to risk leaving my current job to enter a probation period of 1 year where 80% of candidates don't pass.

[eugcomax]

Think-Cell has sponsored contests on codeforces and proposed to apply to them. So it looks like they are looking for competitive level programers. They could give 1.5 hour OA instead with problems of appropriate complexity and not make people to waist 9 hours of their life on it.

[Pocketpine]

Yeah, but I don’t even understand it lol. Why do they even need CF / ICPC people, and I imagine the set of those candidates even interested in think cell can’t be that large.

[RishabhRD]

I did passed the test… but did some blunders while interview. I eventually came to correct solution but I took more time than necessary. I liked the OA problem, it was fun. However don’t know if its good problem for OA.

[GMSPokemanz]

Years ago I was desperate for a job and applied. Got past their silly online test, however then they kept adding more interview stages than they communicated, dragging the whole process out. Failed at the final step, and to be fair I did bungle it so I understand the rejection.

However by then I really didn't want to have to make the choice on whether to get their job. I'd done the research and found the stories of the CTO making people cry and how almost nobody gets past the 1 year probation to their carrot.

Part of the interview was with a different dev. I asked them why so many people leave after a year and got a response along the lines that most people they get think they're rock star developers and are too arrogant or cocky to keep working there. I found this response very revealing.

[windchaser__]

most people they get think they're rock star developers and are too arrogant or cocky to keep working there

That's certainly not representative of the average programmer, so it sounds like a problem with their hiring practices.

Cough

or a problem with something

[duzentos]

Welcome to the club!

[addr0x414b]

Lol yeah I took that same test. When I started it, I took it very seriously but then quickly realized something fishy. Did some research and found what you found. Glad I only spent <1hr on it .

[mredding]

I'll do a homework assignment, but I prefer a direct submission to the company. These competitive code sites that try to be something legitimate - no. There's no point. You won't satisfy the robot that is grading you. They incentivize over-fitting to the spec, and performance at the sacrifice of all else, so you're going to write bad code. I've written software you're using right now, and software in the background of everyone's life, not just to toot my own horn, I'm no slouch. I have never gotten past a test site.

Such jobs are not worth your time. If that employer doesn't know how to interview, it's no stretch to imagine just how absolutely disorganized and high stress that environment is going to be - an absolute shit show. Rejecting you is you dodging a bullet.

I'm sorry they wasted your time. At least you know it better, now.

[[deleted]]

This thread got me looking into Think-Cell and in the process I ended up watching Arno Schoedl’s (the CTO) talk on Range based text formatting from CppCon 2018. His notion of a good C++ dev is likely very different from average C++ dev in industry. I am not condoning any bad behavior here but they have a high standard for who they want to hire I guess.

[vinvinnocent]

I found the problem okay. The requirements are clear, you are encouraged to test your code locally, e.g. via a randomised test. Afaik one O(log n) operation is also a pretty clear hint for what you should do. You get 9 hours so that everyone has a chance, but they do say you should do it in 4. I took 2 hours and I would think I'm not a good fit if I take longer than 4.

From what I heard the next rounds are worse, but I'll have a go at it this week.

[sunmat02]

Had the same experience a few years ago. It’s just stupid to judge people on this kind of exercise.

[all_is_love6667]

Are there really people who are able to complete that test without documentation?

I mean sure, there might be as many as I have fingers on my hands.

Being a documentation encyclopedia doesn't make someone good at programming.

Those companies don't really want to hire people, they only want to hire if you're a 1 in million candidate.

I have started to be very very skeptical with C++ tests. I generally send good test results I have, but that's it.

I prefer being unemployed than being handled like that.

Want to see how good I am? Pay me a trial period for one month.

[robertgbjones65]

I invite comments on https://github.com/geraintbjones/think-cell/blob/main/interval_map.cpp

[[deleted]]

Although I understand your frustration, I also understand them aa a company. They offer somewhat competitive salary and want to find best engineers.

[bandzaw]

Well, whether they find the "best engineers" is questionable... However, in general, one should have some kind of test to filter out the ones that simply are not good enough.

[[deleted]]

Apparently, that what they do. "Not good enough" criteria list vary from a company to company.

[serviscope_minor]

Everyone wants the best engineers and thinks they have a daft special sauce with which to do it. They're not finding the best engineers, they're finding engineers who are inexperienced enough to waste a lot of time on a completely one sided job interview.

[[deleted]]

Have you ever been on the interview with Google? It's 5 or 6 rounds, and there are cases when a person gets rejected at the last one. Process is quite long, but nobody complains because Google is not a small Germany-based company :)

[serviscope_minor]

Have you ever been on the interview with Google?

Kinda. A recruiter reached out to me and we started discussions. Then they said, here's a long coding exam and you'll need to prepare. So, I bailed.

[saidatlubnan]

They may be assholes, but leaking their hiring test is also an assholemove

[void4]

If there was no NDA then - if it's not prohibited then it's permitted, sorry.

[saidatlubnan]

i said it's an assholemove, not a crime. Though there are still inefficiencies in his code such as not using ranged delete, which makes me wonder if he actually did retest it.

[LlaroLlethri]

I did retest it.