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Interview at Dodo Pizza

After reading the title of the article, you may wonder: “What the hell do I need to know about the interview at Dodo Pizza?”. And you will be right. She is not for everyone. We really do not have an IT corporation like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, but a complex and interesting business that arose at the junction of traditional pizzerias and IT. We have a place for developers who need to influence the business and build a global system from scratch, constantly grow up and work on complex tasks, use new solutions based on common sense and trust, who understand that people are more important than processes.

In this article I will tell you how our payline hiring is arranged and give some tips on how to get a job with us.



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Someone talking about seniors who are strewn with sentences?

And there is. But we believe that for a person, in the case of a choice error, each change of work is stress, and for the team to which he comes, defocus and demotivation. Therefore, we are not ready to make an offer on a resume or only on a technical interview and do not understand candidates who are ready to choose an employer in the same way.

Five stages and one zero


⁣0. Summary.
1. Technical screening. Passes by phone, lasts 10-15 minutes.
2. HR interview. Passes by phone, lasts 30-40 minutes.
3. Technical interview. It takes place in one of our offices, lasts an hour and a half.
4. Test day. It takes place in our office, lasts from 5 to 8 hours.
5. Interview with CTO.

Zero stage. Summary


Whether you want it or not, you will always be met by resume. And despite the fact that the IT sphere is constantly experiencing personnel shortages bordering on anorexia, this part should not be neglected.

Personally, for example, I look at the profile work experience. It so happens that a person decides to drastically change his field of activity to a more bread one and goes to programmers immediately after working as a manager in a car dealership (real story). How to consider such a candidate for the position of middle or senior? Have to refuse.

I also look at which companies the applicant worked for before. It will be a plus experience in companies that are known for their good technical level.

Frequent work changes attract attention as an “alarm bell”. If a person works in one company for less than half a year or a year, I ask about the reasons if it comes to an interview.

If you had archioobjective reasons for the frequent change of work, you can indicate them in the information about yourself. But if you often changed jobs, because you cannot get along with people, one way or another you will be bitten at the interview stage. There is nothing to help you with. Although ...

There are two loopholes. By the way, they add chances to absolutely everyone!

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With a successful set of circumstances, the zero stage ends with a short call for 10-15 minutes with HR, during which you will be told about what will happen next.

First step. Technical screening


This stage of the interview is only for applicants for the position of C # -developer. Candidates, for example, in a mobile phone immediately proceed to an interview with HR.

I brought the idea of ​​technical screening to Dodo! Many companies, for example, Amazon, do this, which you can find out about in our podcast “Nothing of the kind” .

The purpose of the screening is to find out in 10 minutes of a telephone interview whether the candidate meets the minimum level in three areas that are important to us:

  • backend
  • frontend;
  • DB

I ask just a couple of questions: first, difficult, then either one more difficult (if the candidate answered well), or medium. For example, for the front: “What is type guards in TypeScript?”. It is important to note that a low level of answers does not mean rejection: for example, we are ready to take people without knowledge of the front. But then the number of potential teams that a candidate can fall into is narrowed.

And once a person fell over on questions on databases. But I decided to give him a chance and time to prepare. A month later, he successfully passed the screening, then the rest of the remaining pipeline hire. And now he works for us.

In addition, during the screening, I like five minutes to talk about one of my previous places of work. So I understand the level of a person’s immersion in business and the level of his responsibility.

In just 10 minutes of the conversation, the answer is ready whether the person will go to the next stage of the interview or not.

Once at a screening there was a developer who responded poorly to the database. I asked who in the current place (where there is work with the database) writes queries, implying that they can work through ORM. He replied that they write simple queries, and send complex ones to the “Complex Queries Department”. Since then, our Data Engineering team has been informally bearing such a name.

Second phase. HR interview


So, you have successfully overcome the stage with a resume and technical screening and get a telephone interview with a representative of our HR team. Everything is pretty standard here: 30-40 minutes of live conversation. The goal of the stage is to feel your software, check compliance with our cultural code, understand the general level of your adequacy and find out the details by resume.

Nothing complicated, it's okay, relax and have fun.

The third stage. Technical interview


A full-time interview takes place in our office and lasts an hour and a half. It is carried out by our developers and leaders of directions. They are directly involved in the selection of new team members. They do not give them strange guys to plant, they themselves choose people with whom they will be comfortable working in the future, and are responsible for these decisions.

We conduct such interviews together, for a pair interview is like pair programming. Keeps both interviewers in good shape. The navigator can always connect to return the interview to the desired course if the driver began to move away from it. Together it’s easier to follow the timing, it’s easier to limit the candidate to chatter if he likes to talk.

And another important point: these will be two different impressions, which gives a much more objective assessment. Especially if one of the interviewers is not directly interested in hiring and has no moral suffering on the topic “we can’t take anyone for the third month already”.

There are technical specifications at this stage. For example, write a simple SQL query on a piece of paper. Or sort out a piece of govnokod.

We give a piece of elite govnokoda, which we wrote ourselves, and ask you to find mistakes. Then we look at how many and what mistakes a person found. Based on its result, many conclusions can be drawn. A simple task will tell you more about a person than he just told about himself: does he write code cleanly, what patterns does he follow in development? History for 10 minutes, and a lot of information.

The fourth stage. Test day


A test day is such a day when a person comes to our office and studies how everything really works. There is a test drive by the car, so we ourselves organized something like that. About a year ago I wrote a detailed article about this. Now there will be a brief retelling.

We do not keep people in an isolated room, everything happens for real. A person comes to a real team, in real working conditions. Since this happens in reality, anything can happen: the product will fly around the corner, I will show my collection of pigs, the person will be able to see the code base, what tools we use, what kind of people work in the company, where they go to dinner at the end of the ends. If you are completely lucky, then you can get to the taste test of the new pizza.

We recently figured out how to solve a test day problem for those who cannot come to the office. With such candidates, we conduct a remote pairing session for 3-4 hours: do exercises on TDD, pair programming, write a small synthetic application.

This is a great opportunity to check how true everything that is told about the company at interviews and outside is true. Understand how comfortable you are in this environment, in this company, to finally make a choice.

There are times when we refuse a person after a test day. It happens that a person refuses us. Why is this happening? Most often because of inconsistencies in software that we could not identify earlier. It’s insulting and unpleasant to admit one’s mistakes, but it’s better than working in an unstable team later.

The fifth stage. CTO


The fifth element of the pipeline is a meeting with Sasha Andronov (our CTO). It is not so difficult to go through it, because usually Sasha asks simple questions: what do you think, what do you want and what do you strive for. In general, the conversation is more about life and global motivation, but that’s why Sasha understands whether you and I have similar values ​​and whether you fit into the team. There are no ready-made recipes and life hacks, how to get an interview with the service station, so just be yourself.

Life after the fifth stage


If a person has successfully completed all stages of the interview, we send him an offer, he accepts it, and then we go to a brighter future together. But if a person could not pass a technical interview, test day or stage with CTO, the following happens: we give him an individual feedback with a layout, which specifically did not suit us.

We do this in the format of designating growth points and recommendations on how to tighten them. We fight to ensure that the feedback is high-quality from a technical point of view and gives people the opportunity to look at themselves differently and grow.

Of course, after a while you can come to us for an interview again. We do not have a fixed term, we focus on common sense: for how much you can pull up that skill that was not enough for the first time. For example, for six months you can pull up some fundamental knowledge, try it in practice and come again.

Instead of conclusions: how to increase your chances of an interview


  1. Get ready for an interview. Read about the company: what the business is about, what it earns from, what technologies it uses. Prepare a list of technical and business questions. Ask them for an interview. After all, this is a test in both directions: whether you are suitable for the company and whether the company suits you.
  2. Look at the information about your potential colleagues. By Linkedin profiles, github repositories. Learn CTO, after all.
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