Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California
Process
Interview Process:
- Introduction Phone Call
- Technical Phone Call
- Onsite:
- 3 Technical Interviews
- Culture Fit Lunch
- Closing Interview with CMO
All in all, I think Discord has a great product and I support the gaming community. However, their interview process was pretty awful and not designed for success.
For a senior position, they interviewed me with three technical 1:1s. Two of those interviews were with junior employees who asked questions they didn't even know the answer to.
An example of this is:
Interviewer: "Just make the API return standard HTTP codes for endpoints." Me: "So you want 201 Created?" Interviewer: "I don't know. Whatever the standard is. That sounds okay."
Interviewer: "You have this data structure in the file." Me: "So it looks like this?" Interviewer looks at laptop: "I'm not sure. Let me read through the question." Me: "Can I see the question?" Interviewer: "That's not necessary, I can explain it to you."
So, we spent 20 minutes of each tech interview chit-chatting because they were nervous about interviewing someone. Then 20 minutes following up, trying to figure out the actual specs of the question, and then 10-12 minutes coding up something hacky because I don't code in a scripting language.
It was a pretty brutal experience overall. Additionally, the hiring manager didn't even meet me at all during the process.
The company seems to believe it can capitalize on some fantasy market that only they know about as well. When asked about company direction, it sounded like 'reinvent' all the other chat apps and just market towards gamers.
It was very difficult, not because of the questions, but because the process was very naive and ill-designed.
Questions
Given a file (on the interviewer's laptop, which took 10 minutes to email/airdrop), parse JSON and run aggregate statistics.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 9 interview experiences for the Discord Senior Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.
Success Rate
Discord's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Discord's Senior Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.
Discord Work Experiences
- 5.0Great Tech, Fun GrowthSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesApril 9, 2020Pros: Discord is an excellent place to work. The team is full of talented, hardworking, ambitious, and humble people. If you use Discord, then you know the Discord application itself is superb. It takes a great team to make a great application. Since Discord is a younger company, there are plenty of opportunities for career growth as we expand. The management team focuses a lot on growing people. There are weekly or bi-weekly 1-on-1s with your manager that are solely focused on career growth. The benefits package is solid. You can check the website for the most up-to-date information. It is on par or better than other places I have worked. My personal favorite benefits are free lunch and gym membership. For engineering specifically, Discord has been an excellent place to work. Discord has a knack for embracing new technologies while still remaining stable in the face of growth. For example, we were early to embrace Rust, Scylla, and React. Also, Discord's engineering team (and entire company, really) is exceptionally small for the number of users it has. So far, we have been diligent about growing the team intelligently. Additionally, we follow many industry best practices around testing, deployment, and product development. We also spend a decent amount of time doing forward-thinking refactoring and development in order to stay out of tech debt. There are a lot of interesting technical challenges at Discord. If you like scaling a fast-growing product, then working at Discord will be a lot of fun.Cons: Discord is a fast-growing unicorn startup. It's exciting, but chaotic at times. If you have a hard time with things changing, then Discord might not be a good fit. With that said, things have become much more stable over time, and I expect that to continue to be true.
- 5.0Job Review & OpinionSenior Software Engineer • Former EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesJuly 10, 2022Pros: Friendly & Hardworking Workspace, Health Benefits, Understanding & Compassionate CoworkersCons: There are none, in my opinion.
- 5.0A great place to work with many talented technical minds and thoughtful leadershipSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesSeptember 22, 2020Pros: The company is both product-driven and engineering-focused. Teams are encouraged to operate independently while still working towards a shared direction. Progression is both fair and transparent, and management cares about people being respected and taken care of. Fairly small company considering the size of the user base. No unreasonable work-life balance expectations, and rare/no crunch times given the nature of the business. Generally a very fun and enjoyable place to work because of the great people on the team.Cons: Growing the company over the years has not always gone smoothly, although there has always been a strong internal effort to both course-correct and reflect when mistakes were made.
Discord Interview Questions
