It's truly unfortunate what a bad interviewer can do to your chances and potential future at a company.

Dropbox had come to my university and set up a presentation/demo on tips on how to crack the technical interview. I applied the next day and was immediately given a HackerRank challenge, which I had four days to complete on my own time (75 minutes, one question). I completed the question successfully, although it was time-consuming, and passed all tests. Then, I moved on to the next round: the phone interview.

The interviewer had trouble contacting me for the first 15-20 minutes of the planned 1-hour interview because they could not reach me (poor signal), so we had to settle for Google Hangouts. Unfortunately, this was the worst part of the experience. I had never used the coding environment before but assumed that my code did not actually have to compile and that we were working on a sort of online text editor where the interviewer would work on the problem with me. The interviewer did not make this clear until well into the interview, and I had to suddenly scramble to make my many helper methods and helper classes real. This took a lot of unnecessary time, as I was left debugging some small syntax error and could not answer any deeper questions about edge cases and such.

Finally, at the original end time (for the 1-hour interview), my interviewer just suddenly said goodbye and that he had to go, out of nowhere, with no real explanation as to what was going on. Overall, throughout the entire interview, he was really quite and not communicating with me at all, even though I tried to move the process along and answer more interesting parts of the question. Furthermore, he did not seem familiar with Java, so he could not help me with a tiny mistake I had. Finally, I could tell that either he had not interviewed people before or that it had been a long while since his last interview. He even said that he "forgot" the constraints of the problem and had not seen it in a while. From what I could see, he was browsing or looking at something else on the web while he was interviewing with me.

Tl;dr: The reason I am writing this review is both for future engineers who plan on interviewing and for Dropbox recruiting.

For recruiters: Please ensure that the best interviewers are communicating with candidates. My interviewer seemed very disinterested the whole time, and I felt really disappointed and disrespected when he just left me at the end of the interview. Since my interview was supposed to last 1 hour and it started 20 minutes late, I was expecting to have another 20 minutes, and the lack of communication from the interviewer was really unfair to me.

For future candidates:

• Manage your time! Make sure that you understand all of the constraints and work fast!
• In case you have the same interviewer as me, make sure you ask about how much time you have.

Good luck!

Online was Folders and Cows.

Phone interview was about implementing a web server count/hit.