Woven by Toyota software engineer interview

Take home assignment
First technical round
Second technical round
Tech lead round
HR round
Manager/VP round

1. Take-home assignment

I was asked to write a simple command-line tool that parses and aggregated some data. You are free to use any programming language that you like. I was told usually one will spend 2 ~ 4 hours but it took me 5 hours to complete the interview. This is better than a lot of other companies' take-home assignments because the scope is smaller and the instruction was clear. The best way to tackle this is to write the code as you would in production. Woven by Toyota deals with huge data so it's important for them to see how well you deal with scalability.

2. First technical round

My first interviewer was very friendly and smart. In a way, he knows how to make interviewees feel relaxed while supporting them by giving hints in a smart way. This interview starts with domain knowledge tests that go through Linux kernel to browser DOM (because I was interviewing the full stack position). Then we started the review of the take-home assignment. While they managed to follow up on some scalability concerns, overall I didn't feel that they have spent enough time going through my works to give good enough feedback. The last session of this interview was live coding. I think they just want to make sure you can code, so there were no Leetcode hard problems and I am thankful for that.

Want to save your preparation time ? Check out furustack.com to understand what you need to prepare instead of guessing.

3. Second technical round

The second technical round was more or less like the first round but they spend more time going through my resume to understand my work. We then have a very short session of domain knowledge tests. Some of them make my eyes roll but overall they were easy enough. We ended the interview with another live coding session.

4. Tech lead round

I expected this round to be a hardcore round but it was totally the opposite. It was more like getting to know each other working styles and preferences. We spend time talking about the ongoing projects and what are the biggest challenges in their team. The interviewer did go through my resume to ask what kind of project am I working on and what was some challenges. Took some time to make sure I cover everything and he thinks my current project choice makes sense.

Some questions that I asked:

How do you deal with an unsolved problem that might bug your team for a while but apparently has a low priority

5 HR round

A few typical behavioural questions start with "Tell me about a time...". You might want to prepare a few stories for this. Prepare a less technical interview because I had a difficult time explaining technical terms such as “crawler” to the interviewer.

Some questions that I asked:

How diverse is Woven by Toyota holdings since all of my technical interviewers are all white male
Why is Woven by Toyota a holdings

6 Manager/VP round

It took them around 2 weeks to schedule this round. This 30 minutes conversation contains a few short behavioural questions that focus on conflict resolution in your past experience. They also talked a lot about company cultures and key improvement areas. Because it's a very short interview and the interviewer seems really busy (stopped interview 1 minute before our time ends), I don't have much time to ask questions.

Summary

Despite the negative comment on reddit, I think the process has been improved over the year. In my opinion, Woven by Toyotas has one of the most humane interview processes compared to others. Instead of accessing candidates via crazy/stressful leetcode hardcoding, or designing a system that only scales theoretically, they do it in a better way like short take-home assignment and accessing past projects deeply. On the other hand, they took really long time for the whole process. They only got back to me after 2 weeks (yeah another 2 weeks) of VP round.

Want to save your preparation time ? Check out furustack.com to understand what you need to prepare instead of guessing.

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