Honestly, it felt like a waste of time.

The initial recruiter screen was standard.

Then came a 60-minute tech screen with one engineer. The question was a LeetCode hard, the kind that shows up at the top of their tagged list. I had seen similar ones on Hack2Hire, so I was prepared and got it working without hints.

Still, I got rejected. The interviewer kept jumping in mid-code with “suggestions,” which only made things more confusing. I didn’t need help, but it felt like they were trying to steer the problem in a weird direction just to add pressure.

At one point, they casually mentioned engineers here “own everything end to end” and “don’t get much input from managers,” which they spun as “a lot of autonomy.” That was kind of a red flag.

Glad I practiced beforehand. Hack2Hire, LeetCode, and Blind helped me recognize the pattern quickly. But the overall experience? Not great.

This was a LeetCode hard recursion problem, one of the top-voted questions under DoorDash's tag.

It was very similar to what I had seen on Hack2Hire.

I was asked to solve it optimally with no scaffolding.