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by inahga 489 days ago
Their interview practices (at least the first round and two years ago) are quite fair. A couple of take-home programming exercises that are respectful of your time. And they'll grant feedback if you ask, if you don't pass.

(I bombed it because my C skills were Rust-y :shrug:)
2 comments
giomasce 489 days ago
By my experience, it helps a lot to have a handful of patches in Wine already. Doesn't have to be anything especially great, but showing that you can work with the conformance tests (both write them and fix them), create good commits, go through the patch review process, interact constructively with the maintainers can get you a lot of points and make up for a not necessarily perfect interview test.

Do not look for the super-core stuff like user32.dll and ntdll.dll. There is already a lot of folks working there and it's hard to make an improvement if that's your first contribution. But there are a plethora of random forgotten libraries in dlls/ which usually nobody cares about until some application depends on those, and they are quite likely to have a good amount of low hanging fruits. Look for the todos in the tests, for example.

Disclosure: I work for CodeWeavers, but I am not involved in the hiring process.

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LucidLynx 489 days ago
I applied early last year, and got rejected by a Senior from CodeWeavers but without any insight...

Just:

"The senior reviewed your work and it's a 'no'. However you may want to consider submitting patches to either Wine or Proton. Developers that get patches into either of these projects tend to be sought out and offered developer jobs."

I found it gross, and thought that it was actually an ad to contribute to both Wine and Proton first, and not hire someone.

I know I am not the best C programmer in the world, but I think that if you spend two hours of your time doing a test to have a chance for an interview, you might have a feedback of what was wrong instead of a "nope dude".

The test was composed of two things: 1. reviewing a bad C code and make comments, 2. you have an is an unimplemented string sorting API and you have to provide the implementation, the unit tests, etc.

First time and last time I applied to CodeWeavers.

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inahga 488 days ago
Sorry I should have been clearer--the initial rejection email did not contain feedback. I replied to the rejection back asking for feedback, and the CEO replied back with the senior engineer's precise feedback.

Otherwise, the test and first response you received was identical to mine.

FWIW I've never received feedback directly from a rejection email. I've always had to reply back and ask.

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LucidLynx 486 days ago
Let me be honest here: I spent time to get a 'hey, nope.', and I should write an email to ask why?

If that's not a waste of time, I really don't know what else to call it...

The main issue in the room is that the feedback *should* be present with the rejection email, especially if they spent 5 minutes for a review and 3 minutes for the rejection email...

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stuaxo 489 days ago
That's not great - not unusual, but I expect better respect of people's time from a company involved in FOSS.

They really should give proper feedback.

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