It started with the 3-hour take-home. This was actually pretty difficult and was a LeetCode question in disguise as a JSON manipulation problem, despite them saying they don't like LeetCode problems. I'd say it was equivalent to a LeetCode hard in terms of difficulty.

I passed that and then had two on-sites: the coding and system design.

The coding interview went great. The interviewer was super friendly, and I passed.

With the system design, however, I agree with others in that it felt more like an interrogation. I answered with every deep dive from hellointerview since I knew what the question was going to be beforehand. It felt as if the interviewer was trying to trip me up and didn't feel as if we were working together.

He also kept interrupting me frequently and refused to let me take the lead in building my solution. He got very hung up on whether the video metadata should be stored in SQL versus NoSQL, which I don't think was particularly relevant to the problem. I believe that was the reason I ended up failing when I said I don't think it matters that much.

It felt like the interview was being given in bad faith with no intention of passing me. In my meta-interview a few weeks prior, they kept emphasizing that SQL versus NoSQL isn't really a relevant debate anymore, so it made it very hard to navigate this interview when the interviewer had a specific solution in mind and was not open to hearing me out.

Even if I knew missing one minor part of the system meant failure, I would not have taken this interview knowing they were that picky. Nobody is designing Netflix perfectly in 45 minutes, and I feel like my time and effort were wasted.

Same questions as everybody else.