Lyft treated me and my co-workers in a completely unethical and evil manner. Their recruiting approached us via M&A for talent acquisition and attempted to poach employees by providing misleading or no feedback to founders.

I was interviewed on-site and never received any feedback. Each contact at Lyft refused to talk to founders, while their HR invited and interviewed one of our employees and extended an individual offer, even though the context was clearly set for a team hire, and they had told us everyone would be interviewed.

My on-site interview felt like Lyft was interviewing a million people and doing everything wrong. All rooms were booked for interviews (including mine, which HR fixed). One of the interviewers did not show up; it turns out he didn't even come to the office that day.

My programming test was one of the worst I've seen in a decent while. If you spent time reading their description of the "programming test" they send before the interview, you've just wasted your time. They gave me a classic trie-related question, one you would have seen a few times easily if you practiced on LeetCode or even interviewed with enough companies (many ask it as a systems design question). The question included a TopCoder-style input and output that made zero sense given the question context. TC style is to hint for optimizations; whoever prepared the question probably had no clue.

Overall, it was a waste of time and a lot of shame we will definitely remember and share with others. We still have never received any response from any Lyft contacts (interviewers, HR, M&A), even though we reached out numerous times and it has been over 2 months.

LeetCode medium/hard level algorithms / data structure questions.