1. Phone Screen

This stage is a more informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you. We are looking for people with a strong interest in startups and motivation to help them; this is usually exhibited by past experience working at or starting one yourself.

The conversation will cover some light technical discussion about web programming and your past projects. Mostly, we want to know that you can code and ship fairly involved systems, and speak to them with clarity on the details. This tends to be a good indication that an engineer had strong ownership and showed autonomy in making product or technical decisions.

2. Technical Screen

Our first technical screen can be either remote or in-person, and is intended as a first pass to assess basic programming web skills (which is core to what we do here!) You’ll work on a 1-hour practical programming problem.

For this project, you should have a full stack web environment set up AND a relational database already running on your machine. Here at Same, we use Next.js with mysql, but React + Vite or anything else you’re familiar with works. To make the most of the time, you should have a working project set up before the interview.

During the interview, you’re also free to google for syntax. We believe this helps developers feel more comfortable during the process, and avoids any learning curve or limitations of 3rd party platforms. While you are welcome to use AI to help with code completion, we’ve found it often adds noise to the interview process.

3. Paid work trial

The work trial process is a deeper dive into technical abilities, product thinking and overall fit. For the “fit” portion, we are again looking for ownership and autonomy, but we also dig deeper into communication. This is evaluated throughout the process -- in how you communicate your approach, solutions and overall thinking.

A work trial is 2 weeks long. We prefer to schedule the in-person trial at our SF office, and we’ll provide lunch and housing for you to get to know more of the team. (We’ll cover costs of travel and accommodations if needed.) We do not guarantee the 2 weeks and we sometimes short-circuit the process if we think it’s not a good fit.

We have found that going through this process gives us enough to make a go/no-go decision. We offer feedback to candidates who request it, and relate the feedback to the skills, qualification and process above.