I applied online. About a week later they sent me a link to their coding challenge. I finished the basic implementation in about 80 minutes (the upper end of what they said it should take), but then proceeded to spend many hours implementing a self-balancing binary tree structure because technically the built in structure wouldn't perform well enough, which was frustrating and I suspect a flaw in their wording rather than an actual requirement (or perhaps just a flaw in the language I chose that the structure wasn't already there). A few days after submitting it, they got back to me asking to schedule a phone interview. It was a pretty typical phone interview. I liked the guy giving it to me though. He responded well to the questions I had about the company, and I was impressed that part of his coding question involved writing tests. They got back to me the same day saying I was moving forward with the onsite interview (perhaps because I had emailed them to say I was going to be in the San Francisco area for other interviews the following week). I had a full onsite (4 technical interviews, 1 culture fit interview with a co-founder) on a Thursday. It went fairly well, nothing too difficult. The lunch was kind of awkward though since we only had 30 minutes to eat, and the guy I was eating with was also trying to talk to me while we ate. At the end of the day, a recruiter told me that I could expect to hear back from them Friday (the next day) or Monday, which blew me away since every other place I had thus far interviewed at had had at least a week to get back to me for every step. I actually wound up hearing back from them before I heard back from the companies I had interviewed earlier that week. The wound up getting back to me on the Monday (1-2 business days after), saying they wanted to extend me an offer. The offer itself was pretty nice; right off the bat it was more than I had hoped for salary-wise (although admittedly, I wasn't sure where to set my expectations since it was my first job and in an area with a higher cost of living than I was used to). I was told they liked to make "strong offers" right out the door without needing to bargain. For all I know, that may have been a line, but given that it was already higher than I had been hoping for, I decided to just roll with it.

I had a great interview experience and I really enjoy talking with everyone on the team. The overall process consists of multiple technical coding interviews with emphasis on communication, and performance. My recruiter is always helpful, and she provided me with lots of feedbacks on how to prepare. I'd definitely recommend and I'm very excited to join Thumbtack!