Seems after 4 years of mostly bad reviews someone would have learned, but obviously not.

Started off with a call with the recruiter, and then we decided to move on to the technical phone interview. The interview questions are about DraftKings' business model, which a lot of people are not familiar with. So, they asked me to watch a couple of 15-minute videos, and the recruiter asked me to create an account. They said they would deposit $DK money in it so I could familiarize myself with how they work. I created the account and sent him the user-ID, and then nothing happened: no response, no deposit. That was a flag of incompetency (flag 1). Why promise something you can't deliver?

A day before the interview, they realized they had a conference, so they had to reschedule. I'd understand if the interviewer had a personal issue, but this is a clear lack of communication between departments or bad time management on the interviewer's side (flag 2).

Fast forward to getting into the interview with the software engineer. He started off asking if I had an idea about their business model. My response was that I watched the tutorial videos but wasn't given the fake money deposit as promised. I told them to bear with me as I'm not familiar with everything they have. They noted it and said they would bring that back to the department.

Starting with the first question, I took some time getting the business model and what they needed. Once I got the idea, I started thinking of the solution, and before I started vocalizing anything, the interviewer goes and says, "You can do it with a double loop solution." So, I went with that solution, as it was their hint (flag 3, will come to this later). There were 5 more questions of the same sort, in which I breezed with a minimal amount of code (one-liners for a couple).

I finished the questions on time and felt good about myself, thinking those questions were aced. Well, I was wrong... A couple of days later, I received an email from the recruiter that they would not move forward. So, I responded, asking if they could provide more details, as I'm surprised by that response. They came back saying the first answer was of complexity O(n^2) (go to flag 3 and see why they would offer me a hint saying it's okay when it's not okay). Is this kind of a mind game? Second feedback is because you struggled with understanding the business model well (refer to flag 1). Lastly, that I didn't have the time to write unit tests, which made me go re-read the interview email confirmation, which has zero references that I have to write unit test code (flag 4).

A piece of advice: Asking people to write code with the not-so-famous fantasy football business model is so gimmicky and doesn't serve the interviewees any better. This is something for more big techs like Amazon and Google and their famous models that we deal with on a daily basis.

Give your interviewers proper training on how to perform interviews. They should talk when necessary, and the hints should help the interviewees to succeed, not to fail.

Lastly, it seems the recruitment team isn't improving and is making false promises. This kind of empowered behavior is a recipe for a failing organization.

I don't think I'll be interested in interviewing with this company again, as it seems they haven't changed in 4 years of mostly negative reviews.

Make sure a player is not on more than one team. That entails list and map manipulation mostly.