This one’s short. It’s not particularly informative since I didn’t make it far in the process - but I’m sharing it anyway, because some details might still be useful.

When I applied to Instabug

I applied by reaching out directly to engineer Hisham at Instabug (whose code I deeply respect - it’s seriously impressive). He had posted a tweet that they were looking for people. I sent him my CV via Twitter DM, waited for a reply, and he later sent me a link to schedule a call with him.

The meeting

The meeting was in Arabic. It started with him asking me to introduce myself, then we talked through my past and current experience, what I was working on at my current company, and whether I’d used any Instabug products before. He also told me about the products and goals they were working on.

At the end, he told me the position required significantly more years of experience than I had.

Important details and my mistakes

  1. My CV wasn’t well organized - this caused confusion because he couldn’t clearly follow the timeline. My LinkedIn also had different dates than my CV. I’m sure this kind of inconsistency affects decisions, so I fixed it afterward.

  2. A company like Instabug wants people who’ve worked on products and apps with a very large user base. I had some small contributions to Firefox and Apple, which is good, but more would have been more convincing.

  3. At a company like Instabug, what matters most is a deep understanding of internals and compilers at some level - because iOS work there isn’t primarily about UI like at most companies.

  4. Had I made it further, the take-home task they give involves building a Logger with testing and mocking - I know because I later saw that same task during an internship.

After this, I saw a Facebook post confirming they needed 4–5 years of experience, which I obviously didn’t have yet. Instabug is genuinely one of those companies you dream of working at someday, alongside a really sharp team.

Sharing this because I want to help anyone who needs to understand how things work - because I didn’t, and I always wished someone would talk about it openly.