Their first round of interviews has been outsourced to another company. A contractor conducts this round.

For the position in question, the discussion topics were good. The interviewer tried to assess the candidate's knowledge around architecture, scaling, and performance improvements of the application. Good questions overall.

The second part of the first round was a coding challenge. Now, this is where I found the whole process distracting. In other coding rounds, candidates are left on their own to complete the process and focus on deliverables. But here, the interviewer was interested in my thought process and kept asking why I was doing a particular thing during programming. I wish they had kept the thought process sharing optional. A good interviewer should be able to follow what the candidate is trying to do by looking at their code.

They also had around 30 minutes for the coding round, and there isn't a clear understanding of how many questions we can solve or what a good target is. It was more like a moving finish line where we should aim to finish as many questions as possible. This puts the candidate in a dilemma about prioritizing code quality versus an "ugly, simple, working" copy.

5 tactical questions covering scalability, application performance, architecture, and more.

1 question in a code round, a comparatively simple code challenge.