Phone conversation, then four onsite interviews in one day.

Coding interview thoughts:

It seemed to prioritize getting a working solution above all else, even algorithmic efficiency. This may be understandable for a startup to ask for, but it can be unexpected to many interviewees. Most coding interviewers would ask the interviewee to write code that is algorithmically efficient. If finishing the code is really the number one priority, please tell the interviewee, "the most important thing is that you finish the code and that it works, not its runtime".

Database design interview thoughts:

The interviewer seemed to have only one solution in mind for the SQL query, looking for a query involving WHERE IN. Has the interviewer considered the solution using a JOIN ON followed by a WHERE condition? Please consider other solutions, even if they are not optimal.

System design interview thoughts:

The interviewer asked good questions and kept the discussion going.

Director interview thoughts:

Interesting discussion on careers and technology.

Overall thoughts:

Based on the interviews, I get the feeling that HubSpot really just wants the work to get done, without even planning ahead. If this is the case, it should be clearly communicated to the interviewee, since this type of problem-solving strategy is usually disliked by most companies.

I was surprised that for the three technical interviews, a decent amount of time was spent asking about projects and work experience. I don't know if these are HubSpot's hiring goals, but if the hiring decision is made primarily based on the results of the technical questions, it would be better to spend more time evaluating the candidate's technical ability and less time on behavioral questions.

Given two sorted integer lists and a max size, merge them into one sorted list, but keep the size to the given maximum size.

Example: ([1,2,5], [2,7,8], 4) -> ([1,2,2,5])