This was the least professional interview process I have experienced.

Initially, they called me on the wrong day, which led to a very uncomfortable interview experience. They did acknowledge the mistake and scheduled a reinterview.

For the next interview, after asking for my availability, they scheduled it for a time that I had clearly stated did not work for me. After two phone interviews following the mistaken one, I was told the final step would be a coding challenge, as I am applying for an internship. However, after performing well on that, they requested an on-site interview.

I reminded the recruiter that I had been told the last step would be the coding challenge and informed them that I needed to decide within two weeks (providing the exact date), making an on-site interview impossible. The recruiter corrected herself and stated that all that was left was a reference check.

Immediately after I submitted my references, she requested another interview. We scheduled this for the following day. I assume they wanted to test something related to Spark on their platform, but the interviewer couldn't get their website to send me a confirmation link for my account in time, and their direct invites didn't work either. Therefore, we proceeded with some basic coding questions. I'm unsure why this was necessary, as the interviewer asked me to write the simplest recursion possible. They even asked multiple times if I had seen the question before, which felt absurd, as no one remembers trivial details like whether they've written a for loop with an increment of 9. It felt more like a test of honesty than anything else.

On top of all this, the interviewer for my coding challenge was 35 minutes late due to BART delays. Seeing as all they had to do was send me the email with the challenge, I don't understand why someone else couldn't have done it instead.

At this point, they had five full business days after all interviews were completed, and even more with my references, before the deadline I had provided. I emailed them once during the last week to ask if they needed anything to expedite the process or if anything was blocking them. They did not provide any information before the deadline.

Three business days later, I emailed them again to request a decision that day. It was only then that they emailed me and ultimately rejected me. One of my references mentioned that they had canceled the call with him the week prior. If they had made a decision then, I don't see why they wouldn't have informed me.

The interview questions were fairly standard. The coding challenge took over six hours on the first day before submission for review, and then approximately four hours on the second day. I cannot accurately judge its difficulty, but given that I spent most of the time figuring out how to write proper tests and dealing with synchronization in Java and received positive feedback, I don't believe it would be a problem for someone more familiar with those aspects. The entire process took over six weeks.

I would NOT recommend interviewing here.

Code up a trie.