I am sad to say that this was, hands-down, the worst interview experience I’ve ever had. Asana was originally my top choice company, but now I must say that I absolutely do not recommend this company.

The first step of the process was a coding challenge. It is a fairly straightforward application of 2D arrays. The next day, the recruiter reached out to schedule a phone interview.

The phone interview went great and was everything I expected from Asana. My interviewer was very smart and, more importantly, very down-to-earth. In particular, he was able to express disagreements and feedback in an empathetic way. This round consisted of a LeetCode-style question and a system design question. You are not expected to write any code, and the focus was heavily on how you think and how you express your thoughts.

After the phone interview was a final round, a ~3.5-hour Google Hangouts session, which consisted of three parts:

• Very similar to the phone interview
• A programming challenge that you do on your own
• Another interviewer hops on and does a code review plus more LeetCode questions

In the first part, the questions were not too difficult, but my interviewer was very condescending towards me. After explaining to him about a previous intern project I’d done, he literally snickered and said, “So all you did was use APIs.” I am still blown away by that response and the fact that he took a 30-second high-level overview and, from that, assumed he knew enough about a 3-month-long project to pass it off as trivial. In hindsight, I wish I had viewed all the red flags that were revealed in the first 10 minutes and just hung up the call, since it only got worse from there. It may be worth noting that he was a musician who joined Asana after attending a coding bootcamp a few years ago. While I believe a year-long coding bootcamp is enough for a lot of software jobs, his lack of experience was apparent throughout the interview. In particular, he fixated heavily on what I would describe as programming gimmicks – coding tricks that seem cool but ultimately hurt overall readability and do more harm than good. Overall, it seemed like he was trying to compensate for his lack of experience by continuously putting down mine while flaunting his own.

I then worked on a coding challenge for about 50 minutes. It is a pretty difficult and long assignment, and definitely not something one could complete in less than an hour. In addition to being more difficult, there are a lot more specifications than there were in the original online coding challenge.

After that, the next interviewer arrived and did a code review. From the onset, it was apparent that my interviewer was more focused on overpowering me rather than interviewing me for the company. This was a very humiliating hour that I had to endure, and if I had to describe in one word how I felt the entire time, it would be: uncomfortable. Firstly, he was upset that I did not finish the assignment and that I did not write tests and run them. Not only was I previously told that my code would not be run, I was also told I wasn’t expected to finish the problem (and there is very little possibility that someone could without, of course, seeing the problem on Glassdoor beforehand). This just goes to show how uncoordinated this company, which is supposedly all about keeping teams coordinated, is. He then questioned how I would write some of the functions I did not end up completing. This interviewer seemed out of touch with interviewing standards, since interviewees are typically encouraged to think out loud and to identify pros and cons of different approaches. Well, not with this interviewer. He would get upset if I didn’t have an immediate answer to a problem, and if I tried to think about a problem and express my thoughts, he would cut me off and say, “Just code it.” If there were two reasonable approaches to a problem, I would try to explain the costs and benefits, but he would cut me off and say, “Just make a decision and move on,” in a very aggressive tone. It felt uncomfortable not being able to speak without being cut off and being pressed to write code out immediately. This was a very aggressive person.

Before the interview even ended, I had already decided there was no way I would join Asana. At the end of it all, what I have to say to Asana is this: empathy seems to be undervalued at your company, and it would be to your benefit to foster more empathy among your employees.

Tell me about yourself.