Submitted my resume on their website, and one of the engineers contacted me by email. We scheduled a call, but on the day of, he never called. I emailed him asking if we were going to conduct the call, and he called me 30 minutes later. The guy was pretty unprofessional over the phone, but I still felt I should continue the interview process because why not.

He told me I had to come in for a 2-hour coding assessment (which I see differed from most people here on Glassdoor). I said okay, and he told me I should expect HR to call me. HR called me, and I told them my availability. They said that was fine and they would send me an email to confirm everything. The next week came, and no email ever arrived. So I emailed the guy again, and he told me I was supposed to come on one of the days of the week (note: I told them my availability, but to have to find out exactly which day works for them and me by having to email the engineer is another unprofessional move. I really should have read this as a red flag).

HR sent me the email later.

On the day of, I showed up to the company headquarters. An HR representative greeted me and was very accommodating. I was led to a room, and then the engineer I was talking to on the phone showed up with a laptop for me to perform the challenge. He left me with the laptop to do the challenge for 2 hours and told me he would be back in 1 hour. He never came back, and I finished the 4 questions they gave me on this dinky ThinkPad. 2 hours and 30 minutes later, and finally, I called him on their company phone. He said, "Oh" on the other end of the line and then came in. He continued to go through my code and then began to lambast me over minor details.

Here is the part where I got pretty frustrated. Sure, maybe I am technically "challenged," but there were aspects of his explanation that made me think this guy's coding style was archaic and stubborn. Whether it was a refusal to embrace OOP or just the way he explained things was very off-putting. Having gone through other interviews with other companies, I was unready for such a refusal to accept that engineering at its core is to embrace change and have the ability to review your mistakes.

After the end of this session, I almost wanted to walk right out of the interview. For professionalism's sake, I did not.

I was then interviewed by 3 more engineers. My second interviewer was actually a decent and friendly person. I felt more relaxed around him and was able to go over basic concepts with him. Shoutout to this guy. We talked about some basic OS concepts and then he had me do a programming question on the whiteboard.

Third interviewer was also not bad, but given what happened with the last hours, I was pretty tired and ready to stop. The final interviewer was just as bad as the first one. He mumbled a lot while asking me questions, and by this time, I was ready to call it quits. He asked if I had anything to ask him, and I asked him what brought him to this company. He said he was there because the company was private during the economy and he wanted to make money. By then, I kind of understood the company culture.

It was past the end of the workday, and I was ready to head out. Talking to the interviewers gave me a sense of what kind of company it was, and I realized it's definitely not for me. The company was founded by Asian founders, and whether it has been successful or not, but I could feel the application of Asian work-life on its workers and the age it has been displaying.

I don't recommend applying for this company for anyone who wants to be able to do more with engineering and challenge themselves. Besides the second interviewer I talked to, it doesn't seem like any of these guys is capable of embracing change. I seriously started doubting myself as an engineer and everything I valued after this experience.

All of the questions you see on Glassdoor are on the coding assessment. Except they swap one out where they ask you to implement strtok().

Also, I got asked to write a function to delete a range of bits given the start bit and the end bit.