Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California
Process
I reached out to a recruiter I met after a Dropbox event in SF in July, around February.
I was sent a coding challenge by the recruiter that involved a 90-minute exercise on HackerRank. My code never compiled or passed any test cases, so I assumed I'd be rejected, but I had a pretty good and efficient algorithm.
To my surprise, I passed that and then scheduled an on-campus interview for the next day. It was a BFS problem with some follow-up questions that lasted an hour. Within 20 minutes after the interview, I got the go-ahead for the onsite.
At that point, I took a month to study up on concurrency and design patterns before I went into the onsite. I made sure to ask as many questions as possible to understand what I would be grilled on.
The onsite consisted of four one-hour technical interviews, one demo of products, and one lunch interview.
It was a little unfortunate because my lunch was cut short to 30 minutes due to delays in trying to find open rooms, but Dropbox employees handled these delays and issues very well.
I interviewed on a Thursday and received my offer on the following Monday.
Must say, Dropbox is one of the most efficient and most amazing interview processes I've been through. I always felt well-communicated with and was very impressed with HR and their fast, 5-minute response times.
Questions
Understand concurrency and locks.
Master system design principles.
Know the tradeoffs between space and time.
Think about creative ways to eliminate expensive operations.
Study questions concerning matrices.
While specific real questions are tempting, studying design patterns and basic tradeoffs of data structures will help more than memorizing problems.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 57 interview experiences for the Dropbox Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.
Success Rate
Dropbox's interview process for their Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Dropbox's Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.
Dropbox Work Experiences
- 5.0Great place to workSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesMay 30, 2013Pros: I get to work with some of the most intelligent and hardworking people I've ever met. The work is challenging and interesting. Every perk you expect to see at a stereotypical Bay Area startup is available: a gym, a masseuse, three 5-star meals a day, and a social calendar.Cons: There are some growing pains. This usually looks like transient bottlenecks, but occasionally involves having management structure form organically rather than deliberately, which doesn't always feel optimal.
- 5.0Best company I've worked atSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesDecember 12, 2014Pros: After working at other major/top Silicon Valley companies, Dropbox is definitely the best company I've worked at. The level of technical talent here is better than pretty much any other company, and Dropbox maintains a high hiring bar to ensure it doesn't drop. This provides a lot of opportunity for learning and means that I can fully trust my coworkers to produce excellent work. I also get a lot of control over what I work on and how it should be implemented. My manager/PM are always open to suggestions on how things should work, from the technical to the product level, and I don't usually have to go through them anyway. Work/life balance is great. I don't work weekends at all and I have yet to go above 50 hours a week (not including meals at the office). Compensation is on par or better than any other company in SV, and the perks are great (best food of any tech company!).Cons: The company is still growing very quickly, which means that a lot of the processes aren't as set in stone as they are at larger or more stable companies. This means that when trying to do certain things, no one really has a good idea of how to go about it (e.g., compensation reviews were only standardized relatively recently). This doesn't actually affect much in practice, however, as everyone I've met is more than willing to work with you to make sure things are made right.
- 5.0Good Company, Bad LeadersSoftware Engineer • Current EmployeeSan Francisco, California, United StatesJune 9, 2018Pros: - Excellent company. - Got most things right.Cons: Staying for a really long time makes you run into incompetent members of the leadership.
Dropbox Interview Questions
