The positive aspect was dealing with the HR person. She was great – kept me informed, was friendly, and professional.

The technical interviews were easy, but as I found out after the interviews, Instacart has been struggling with hiring engineers because hardly anyone can pass their interviews.

The interview process included an initial tech screen on HackerRank, followed by a virtual onsite consisting of four interviews: systems design, behavioral/leadership, and two coding challenges on HackerRank.

I left the interview with high confidence about my performance, but was later told I "hard failed" the coding questions. Oh, did I mention I coded out a fully working solution, explained my runtime, passed all test cases, and communicated the whole way through?

It's a private company, and they can assess candidates however they want, which is fair. I just wanted to post this so that future candidates don't feel disappointed when they get rejected (for not meeting their expectations, which they don't even know what they are).

For Instacart, I would recommend you stop interviewing engineers until you figure out your process and have an objective way to assess your candidates. Otherwise, you are just wasting everyone's time.

Easy data structure question.

An easy programming question about decoding a password.

A medium algorithm type question.