It was a front-end specific role. I was reached out to by an internal recruiter on LinkedIn who did a fine job in describing the role. The interview kicked off with a 45-minute video call with the recruiter, who was genuinely interested in making sure that this job was the right fit for me, and we were on the same page in terms of compensation. After that, the next round was scheduled based on availability. The next round was divided into two phases with a 15-minute break in between:

1. Problem solving: 45 minutes (Poor experience with the interviewer, including whiteboard coding, a very impatient and immature way of taking the interview)

2. Values assessment session: 45 minutes (Really great experience with the interviewer, behavioral questions, mature and a good listener) For the "Problem solving" section, here's a detailed account for the patient ones: The interview started with a very short intro from the interviewer's side, and they asked me to keep my intro very brief since the person had already seen my CV. The interviewer mentioned that I was free to use inbuilt sorting methods if required, which was a bit of a relief. Then, I was given a link to a whiteboard tool with the problem statement written in code comments. It was vaguely readable, had a poor user interface, and the tool was freezing a lot during coding, which the interviewer was trying to fix on their side as well.

The problem was massive, requiring the implementation of two methods within a class. I got surprised and mentioned that this would take a lot of time. At this point, the interviewer said it's alright, and I didn't need to finish everything. The actual implementation required juggling with hashmaps and partitioned arrays, involving three for loops, with the last two loops nested, more than six temporary variables, multiple arithmetic operations based on temporary variables and loop counters, as well as round-offs. The first method expected two parameters, and the other one expected four.

The actual implementation changed based on the parameters. I had never seen anyone ask such huge problems for front-end interviews in my 8+ years. I was told that I didn't need to run the implementation code, as the idea was to judge me based on my approach. At some point, I asked if I could try to run the code, and the person agreed, but I still felt they got annoyed. The interviewer took the cursor every now and then to copy-paste some values into the editor without even asking, which messed up the code and curly braces since I was still typing.

My code was all over the place; seriously, that's not how one should conduct whiteboard interviews. Then I was asked one-by-one about which data structure I would use and how I would proceed with looping values, for which I suggested the right ones, and the interviewer agreed. I was halfway through and felt I was doing fine, but suddenly, with less time on hand, the interviewer became a lot impatient and started asking what the next step would be like every 3 seconds.

Finally, I was told that time was up, and I could stop coding. I was told to expect to hear back from the recruiter about what comes next. I was still hopeful because I was giving the right answers to the in-between questions, but based on the recruiter's follow-up email, I was told that I got rejected because the problem solving round did not meet the expected level (God knows what was expected here). No feedback was collected from me, and it was a very poor way of handling rejections.

I'm not sure if the interviewer was judging based on what criteria; I never expected this kind of subpar interview experience with Intercom. Maybe it was just bad luck for me. I think if there were two people involved in taking the interview and making a decision based on both of their inputs, it wouldn't have mattered if I failed; I would have probably had a better interview experience at least. If you know it's a huge problem and can't be solved within the time frame, why would you not trim it down and expect the candidate to complete it fully with your test cases passing? You mentioned that you know the whiteboard tool is buggy and freezes quite often, why would you not replace it with another tool before starting the interview?

You have to design and implement two methods of a class which involves making use of hashmap, partitioned array, rounding off values for calculation and multiple nested loops.