Pathrise Guide
How to Get a Job at Slack
About this guide
These pages are meant to provide helpful information about how to get a software engineering, product manager, data science, and designer job at Slack. Being prepared and knowledgeable is a key to every step of the hiring process. You can tab through each part of the guide to see information that can be helpful to your stage from office location for those trying to figure out if a company has a presence in your city of choice to real world interview questions. These guides contain much of the same information we have Pathrise fellows review before they apply or interview for a job with Slack for roles including Software Developer, Mobile Developer, Software Engineer, Web Developer, Software Architect, Computer Programmer, Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Data Engineer, Product Designer, UI Designer, UX Designer, Experience Designer, Web Designer, Product Manager, and Technical Product Manager and other tech, data, and product related roles. We hope you find these helpful and if you have content that you think we should add or think we got anything wrong, please email us at [email protected] and let us know.
- Great company culture and benefits
- They are working on their diversity and inclusion after some complaints
- Compensation is considered average-high compared to other similar companies.
The entire process can take up to 1 month on average.
Stage 1: Coding challenge on Codility.
Stage 2: Phone interview with hiring manager.
Stage 3: Onsite interview
The onsite consists of 5 45 minute interviews, each focusing on a different area. 2 interviews are technical and 2 are more conversational. Part of the onsite interview involves doing a code review of one's own assessment.
The interview process took 2 weeks on average.
Stage 1: Phone screen with recruiter.
Stage 2: Analytics SQL challenge.
Stage 3: Phone interview with hiring manager.
Stage 4: Onsite interview.
The onsite interview begins with a presentation to the hiring committee of the candidate's take-home exercise. The remaining portion of the onsite is individual interviews with 5 people.
The usual process takes 3-4 weeks.
Stage 1: Phone screen with recruiter
Stage 2: Design exercise
Stage 3: Onsite interview
The onsite is a panel presentation of the candidate's portfolio. The last portion of the onsite is individual interviews with the people who attended the presentation. There is a whiteboarding exercise included as well.
The interview process can take up to 1 month.
Stage 1: Phone screen with technical recruiter.
Stage 2: At-home assignment
Stage 3: Presentation of assignment and resume review with 2 managers (60-75 minutes)
Stage 4: Onsite interview
The onsite begins with panel presentation, either of their home assignment or a scenario from past work. After that, there are individual 30 minute interviews with the people who attended the panel (PM Director, PM Lead, Engineering Director, Design Director, designer, researcher).
- Review a pull request on Github.
- Build a single page application image gallery, connecting to a public image api, and add lightbox functionality. Make it performant and cross-browser compatible.
- Review your submitted code, MVP and above for showing a gigapixel image in the browser, MVP for a basic Slack client, in-depth resume questions, and behavioral questions.
- Make a single-page app which read from an API, displayed the data on the page, and update the page without refreshing. The user should also be able to click on an entry and get an overlay with more details. The only technical limitation was to not use any frameworks.
- Probability questions.
- Difference between http and https.
- Create an algorithm for human readable sorting.
- Technical questions specific to the team's problems
- Tech stack questions (pushes you to discuss trade-offs, design patterns, how you can improve runtimes, etc)
- Familiarity with Slack and company culture.
- Define UDP/TCP and give an example of both.
- How would you prioritize which country to expand Slack to for furthering the international effort?
- Measure the success of a Slack feature using this dataset.
- There are lots of steps within product design, such as research, prototyping, visual design, technical implementation. Which step do you spend the most time on, and which do you see as your strength?
- Explain how you work with engineers, designers, and product managers.
- Looking back at the design for this project, what would you change visually?
- Walk me through how you'd convince an engineer to do X?
- What is the most important metric for Slack and why?
- What feature would you improve?
- How would you drive adoption of apps from Slack's app directory?
- What holds Slack back as you think of unreleased feature x? What would you build in the short term? What would you build in the long term?
- People don't like the moment when the check arrives and you have to split the bill. Design an app to help you split the bill among a party of people
- What would you build as an MVP for a 3D printer that can print any type of pharmaceutical?
- Aggregate prints per household dipped but the marketing campaign was a success and unit sales increased. Explain why this happened.
- Describe a well designed product and why you love it.
- How have you used data to inform your decisions?
Mission
To make people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.
- Empathy.
- Courtesy.
- Thriving.
- Craftsmanship.
- Playfulness.
- Solidarity.
- San Francisco: 500 Howard Street
- Toronto: 171 John Street
- Tokyo: Otemachi Financial City Grand Cube, 3F 1-9-2 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku
- New York: 436 Lafayette Street
- Melbourne: 551 Swanston St
- London: 152-156 Great Portland St
- Vancouver: 401, 1028 Hamilton Street
- Dublin: 4th Floor, One Park Place