Two back-to-back, one-hour phone screens: one soft skills and one technical.

Since I was in the Bay Area, I opted for an onsite as these were back-to-back interviews. From the get-go, the experience was not great. While I applied for a Senior Staff Engineer role, I was asked to apply for a Staff Engineer role instead, as the one I applied for got filled recently. That sounded like low-balling, but that wasn't the bad part. It took three attempts for the coordinator to book the two interviews after a blackout for a week from the recruiter who made me literally apply for the role during the phone call, as she was impressed with my resume.

First Attempt: Recruiting coordinator scheduled one onsite interview each for two days, and that was ridiculous. Second Attempt: She then scheduled and confirmed an interview one day before the actual date and cancelled the interviews literally early in the morning on the interview day. Third Attempt: She scheduled an interview and notified me at 7 AM in the morning for an 11 AM interview. I was tired and wanted to be done with it, so I said yes. But when I reached their office, I was made to wait for 40 minutes as the coordinator wasn't available to receive me. Then the interviewer was in the SF office and not Sunnyvale, and then there was no room, and then the room that I finally got didn't have a working video-calling option.

As if these signs weren't enough, I interviewed with this self-obsessed guy who said he would finish the interview in 10 minutes so that I could still do the technical round and how it was a waste of his time to even do this interview. Once the interview started, he kept on talking about himself for 40 minutes instead of asking me any real questions. I tried to interject and try to relate my experience with what he was saying, but he wouldn't stop boasting about how damn good he was.

The technical round was the only thing that went well, but the interviewer was hung up with an optimization for a not-so-used flow in the algorithm, even though I did mention to him the reason why I wasn't optimizing it for the flow.

I feel sad that I wasted so much time for this company.

Ranked caching.