I was recently interviewed at Chime for a Software Engineer position. The process was as follows:

• HR call
• Phone screen
• Onsite - 1 behavioral, 2 coding, 1 system design

All the interviewers and recruiters were kind people, and great to talk to.

However, my experience was very frustrating and negative. I was asked extremely difficult questions during the coding rounds, both easily qualifying as LeetCode Hards and far more difficult than any other onsite I’ve done (including at places like Snap, Instacart, and Pinterest). My recruiter kept saying they would be “practical questions.” This was false. Not only that, but for the second coding round, the expectation was to spit out a fully optimized solution from the get-go. The coding platform, CodeSignal, doesn’t allow brute-force solutions to work, as the pre-defined test cases time out during execution.

But perhaps the most frustrating thing is the massive variance in questions in their internal question bank. The phone screen question I got was a joke, basically a LeetCode Easy. From looking at other people’s reviews online, they’re mostly asked Easy/Medium questions during the onsites. That wasn’t the case for me.

I got a first-hand look at how much the questions vary: the second coding round interviewer accidentally gave me the same question as I had in the round before. I told him this, and he changed the question to the same one I got during my phone screen! The same joke of a question that anyone could code in their sleep was being given to candidates in their onsite rounds at the same time as Hard questions. I was shocked by this. I was honest and told the interviewer I already had this question during the phone screen, and he changed it again. This time, the question was new and seemed to look like a reasonable Medium. But then the interviewer changed his mind and said he wanted to ask a different question. Finally, we landed on a crazy Hard question. The first half of this question alone is a copy of a LeetCode Medium. Then there’s an additional twist to the question, plus you have to spit out an optimized solution.

My feedback to the recruiting team at Chime: please, please ensure that the question bank interviewers ask questions from contains questions that are consistently the same in terms of difficulty. Otherwise, whether you pass or not is up to pure chance, as some candidates get easy questions and others get hard questions. Why are some candidates asked easier questions than others? Does that seem fair? Have you asked interviewers whether the questions are all the same level of difficulty?

My recommendation: don’t bother interviewing at Chime. The interview process is broken, needlessly tough, and a waste of time.

I've signed an NDA, so I can't say.