The Top Braintree Interview Questions and Answers Guide

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

Every company has an identity, a set of values that ultimately affect how the company is perceived. What matters to you? Your employees make up the identity of your company, and every new employee changes that identity, even if it’s only slightly. Are you the best solution in your space, or do you want to offer the cheapest price to your customers? Are you focused on making money or being admired in your field? Its important to be mindful of this change when youre growing your team.

There are two aspects that should be considered when evaluating a candidate in regards to your company. The first is how their values align with your values. Do your developers care more about getting work done quickly than about writing good code, or the other way around? How do you test? How important are communication and teamwork? If the candidate doesn’t care as much about the things that your team values, those values will weaken over time if you hire them. You have to decide if thats okay.

The second aspect is the team dynamic. How would the new person work with the team? Will they get along with your developers and make them more productive? Or will they add stress and may cause conflict, which will lower morale and productivity? Maybe you need some new conflict to make the team question its current values.

There isn’t a single interview process that will give you the confidence in a candidate that you want, no matter how long it is. However, there are several ways to evaluate interviewees that will help you reach your goals. There are many qualities that would make a developer a good fit for almost any company, but it’s important to remember that every company is different. The best interview techniques will depend on your unique set of values and work styles.

We expect a lot from our company when it comes to customer service and helping our clients. We want them to have the best customer service experience ever when we work with them. Sometimes this interaction is via phone or email, and other times its through our documentation, gateway, and API. Poor customer service is not acceptable to us, and we want every new employee to help us live up to the high standards we’ve set for ourselves. In order to do that, we’re looking for people who will never be happy with “good enough” and who will work hard to make our offering better all the time. All of our other values are important because they support this one.

Communication is naturally very important to us, even for our developers. It is easy for our customers to get help from our developers, and we expect all of them to be able to handle support tickets quickly, politely, and enthusiastically. Effective internal communication is more frequently needed, talking to other developers as well as non-development team members.

Collaboration is crucial to the success of larger efforts. The more effectively people are able to work together, the more effectively theyre able to get things done. We value collaboration very highly, and continually work towards removing barriers. Nearly the entire company works from a large, open room. We hate cubicles and we share desks. We love to pair program. Some people work from home, and sometimes that’s the only option. We make the best of it, but we know we’re much more productive when we’re all together.

We also believe that morale is extremely important. Happy developers write great code. We want our employees to be successful, and that means having peers they can trust to do their work at the same high level of quality they expect from themselves. Our devs want to work with other exceptional devs. Of course, that’s not a surprise, but having even one or two developers who can’t do their fair share of the work can have a big effect on morale.

Of course talent is very important and cant be overlooked. At Braintree, we believe building great teams is more important than individual rock stars. I guess you could say were essentially trying to build a rock orchestra here. We have very high standards for developers in terms of talent, but talent alone will never get someone past the other values.

Pretty much all interview processes involve some form of initial screening, and were no different. When a job applicant contacts us, we set up a call to tell them more about the company, ask them a few more questions, and get a general idea of whether they will fit in with our culture. Would they be happy here? Are they looking for the kind of work we’d give them? Do our values match up with theirs?

Developers that pass the initial screen are provided a coding problem. Sometimes candidates self-select out of the process at this point, which we feel generally works in our favor. Developers who agree with the values we list in our job postings won’t let an hour of development time get in the way of their chance to work here. Our coding problem is straightforward and we accept solutions in any language. Some candidates have put their code on Github, which we always look at. However, the answers to our own coding problems help us compare candidates who are finding the same answers.

Even though the problem is easy, each solution is a little different. This tells us a lot about how they plan to make software in the future. Do they write tests? If so, did they write the tests first? How did they solve the problem? With patterns? Strong OO? Something new and clever? Did they use the language’s features to make something beautiful? Does their code make sense to the reader? The evaluation can be subjective, but it’s still a good way to learn more about the candidate and decide if we should hire them. In the end, we want to know if they care about quality as much as we do, are great at talking to each other through code, and have the kind of talent we like.

Following the code review, we interview candidates over the phone. We try to keep the call between 30 minutes and an hour long and talk about as many things as possible. To keep the call moving along and to make things more consistent, we go through a list of questions we’ve already thought of and ask each candidate the same ones. The questions are technical and we try to keep the conversation informal. This is our first real opportunity to evaluate the candidates communication style. We look into a lot more than just what’s on a resume and try to figure out what the person’s technical strengths and weaknesses are. We invite them to a full-day, on-site interview if we think they can communicate well and have the skills we’re looking for.

The first stage of our on site interview is basically an extension of the phone interview. We talk about a lot of different things on the phone interview, but we try to get more specific during the technical interview. Well ask questions based on responses from the phone interview. We probe a candidates strengths and weaknesses further. Communication is always a factor, but were primarily assessing technical competency. The candidates we like usually know a lot about a few things and have strong feelings about how software works and what technologies are best.

Applicants join us for lunch when they interview, and its a great opportunity for casual discussion. We love to hear what sort of side projects they have, what they do for fun. We ask a few friendly technical questions too. Were still evaluating communication, but more how they gel with the team. We want to know how well enjoy having them working with us everyday. Its important that new hires fit with us culturally, as it affects morale.

After lunch, we like to spend some time working on logic problems. The logic problems are non-trivial, but there are no tricks. Theyre chosen because solutions can be arrived at through reasoning and deduction. Even though they’re made up, they’re still a good representation of the hard problems we had to deal with every day at work. Real businesses have hard problems that need to be fixed, and we need to be able to work together to do it.

Finding the answer is not as important as how the candidate approaches the problem. We want to make sure they understand the answer when we get there. In fact, every candidate always gets to the solution. We coach them along when they seem to get stuck, half-collaboratively solving the problem with them. We ask them to talk through the problem solving and offer them a whiteboard. Were assessing ability for abstract reasoning along with how they communicate and collaborate.

The last part of the on-site interview is a pairing session where we work with them to improve the code they turned in at the start of the process. Today is the best chance for us to see how they work with others and get a feel for how they’d be on a daily basis. We try to keep it as informal as possible. We’ve had many chances to hear them talk about software development before the pairing, and now we get to see them work.

As you can see, weve constructed our interview process around our values. Our process has changed over time, and we keep improving it and making changes when things aren’t going as smoothly as we’d like. Our approach to designing our interview process has worked very well for us. Your results may vary.

We are always looking for great developers of all levels of experience to join our team if you want to see how we interview people for jobs. Check us out at joinbraintree. com. Wed love to hear from you! ***.

Or, Why All Interview Practice Advice Should Be Taken with a Grain of Salt

There have been quite a few posts lately offering advice on popular interview practices. All of them have good points, but one thing that hasn’t been said yet is how important it is to hire the right people for your business. I’d like to tell you about how Braintree hires people and the different methods we use to find the right people for the job.

What it Takes to Succeed as a Payments PM by Braintree Group PM

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