Welcome to the partywitme.com technical hiring process, where we do things a little differently!

Instead of traditional interviews and resumes, we like to keep things interesting by giving you challenges to work on at home. These challenges are based on real work we do, and are designed to help us see your skills and potential.

Your resume is not part of our decision-making process. Feel free to send us a resume! We'll look at it! But we'll forget about it when we grade your challenge results.

Should you apply given that you don't have much job experience in the work we do. Well: for any of our roles, we'll tell you what the hiring challenges are. If you can knock them out, go for it. We love discovering talent, and, just as importantly, we're set up to actually do it.

Our hiring process usually consists of a few at-home challenges, followed by a "work day" where you'll collaborate with us on a real engineering design project. If everything goes well, the next step is discussing an offer with you.

There are other good things about our process:

• We don't time the challenges, and you can get them done in dribs and drabs of your spare time if that's best for you.
• We don't look over your shoulder, can't see your typos, and aren't driving up your cortisol with loaded sighs and "hmms" as you work. We want to see you in your best light.
• You get to use your own dev setup, which, of course, includes Internet connectivity and the ability to Google things, because that is how all code in the industry is actually written.

Our challenges aren't artificial. There are no binary trees to invert. We just extract work we've actually done ourselves, and simplify it to the point where we think it can get done in a few hours. Our challenges all have objective rubrics (that turns out to be the hard part of developing a work-sample challenge!) and we can usually grade them pretty mechanically.

So that's another win: if you find our challenges dreadful, you've learned something important about whether you're going to enjoy the actual work here.

What About Time Limits?

We don't take delivery time into account when grading challenges. Take a day, take a week, take a month.

We have only two caveats to offer about the amount of time you spend on challenges:

1. If you really do take a month to do the challenges, our staffing situation might change by the time you're done, and we won't be able to move forward immediately. So: if it's going to be a while before you can get to the challenges, let us know, and we'll be able to warn you if there's any time sensitivity on the role you're applying to. We don't want to have you doing challenges for a role that isn't open by the time you're done!
2. We've said it already but we'll say it again: we've tried to calibrate these challenges (by running them many times) so they take roughly the same amount of time as an interview would. You can put as much time into them as you'd like; we're not going to notice. But if you're getting sore about the amount of time they're taking, you should reach out to us and we can try to figure out what's happening. Sometimes, you might be overthinking the challenge; other times, the role you're applying to might not be a perfect fit for where you're coming from.

What if I Have Questions?

You can't lose points by asking us questions. In general, we consider questions to be a positive indicator.

There may be some questions that we aren't able to answer. That's fine; we'll just provide evasive responses. Please do not moderate your questions for our benefit. You'd be surprised how much we're willing to cough up.

Many hiring systems play their cards close to their chest and (intentionally or unintentionally) evaluate candidates based on their ability to navigate a hazy process. That is not our style.

We want to anticipate how well you'll perform on our team while doing real work. If our processes were so murky that sniffing them out was a true test of your skill, we'd have problems of our own to fix on a day-to-day basis. We want to see you in the best light possible.

What About Start Dates?

This is critical: we can only make offers with notice dates one month or less in advance. If you're looking for a job to start in a few months (when you graduate, for example), you're generally welcome to go through our process and receive a "soft yes" from us.

You can ping us if you're available to take an offer starting within a month, and we'll extend an offer.

A word of caution: even though we anticipate hiring for the majority of our positions pretty much continuously, the economy can become unsettling. We can't make any promises about openings in the next few months. An offer is a commitment, and we can't make one if you want to start several months from now. We'll do our best to be upfront about this!

Our Process in More Detail

When you apply for a specific role, we can walk you through each stage and what to expect.