TL;DR: If your time matters to you, don't waste it here!

It was the most awful interview experience I had during my current job search for a Senior/Staff/EM/TL level position.

=== TIMELINE ===

• It took us more than a month to finish the first phone interview. It was slow. Have you seen Zootopia? Imagine having that sloth try to hire you.

• After seeing the HM (Hiring Manager) in person in their office as the first step, things started going extremely slow. The HM told me in person that he was going to ask for setting up a technical interview as the next step, and then two weeks later I received an email that "we would like to move forward..." which basically meant it took 2 weeks from the HM to just say "schedule a TPS" to the recruiter. I have been the hiring manager for more than 100 applicants in the past two years, and this simple action, usually a message in ATS (application tracking system, they use Lever) or a direct message in Slack, takes 15 seconds, not 15 days!

• Fast forward, after 39 days they wanted me to have a second round of phone interview! I pinged the hiring manager a couple times, and he didn't even care enough to respond! I couldn't believe someone, with whom I spent more than an hour just a couple weeks ago, could be so ignorant. A simple "I hear you, let me know if I can do anything" would be the minimum respect toward a senior applicant. I was looking for that in the wrong place.

• We initially agreed that my TPS (phone interview) would happen onsite in their office. Later, without any notice or detail, they said it would happen on the phone and denied such an agreement!

• After the first TPS, which clearly went very well (see below), they insisted on having a second phone interview! I told them that I had already received an offer from Google and Amazon for a Senior position, and Facebook and Dropbox agreed to waive the phone interviews for me given my resume, level, and timeline. But apparently these guys' time is way more precious than they didn't even want to presumably waste 2 to 4 hours of that!

• In the past 12 months, I had held more than 100 phone and onsite interviews as "interviewer" in my current company. For emergency cases in terms of timeline, even at SE-I level, we plan to bring the candidate onsite and we set the expectations that we might decide to cut it short if it doesn't go well. It's very common. But these guys are apparently so tight into their "quarterly plannings" that with hundreds of engineers, they couldn't even afford that! Impressive, right? :-)

=== EXPERTISE AND PROFESSIONALISM ===

• The original link for the TPS was to codepen.io, and the interviewer didn't even know it's not collaborative! The same happened once before with Lever's calendar scheduling link -- it wasn't working for me since the recruiter had shared her own view on Lever, not the public one.

• Recruiter said parking downstairs is $4 per 20 minutes, max $20. It was $5 per 20 minutes, max $25! And it's the same building as their office.

• Let's assume the price for the parking was just updated. The recruiter also shared a $25 Lyft coupon in her email. I redeemed that after a week, and it was only $15! I couldn't believe that! I brought this up to her as the "PS." of the next email in the thread, and she simply just ignored it. Yes, $5 is literally less than one minute of the salary I am looking for (and have offers for), so it's absolutely not about the money -- it's about how much people care about the details and hold themselves accountable for the mistakes and are willing to improve their surrounding. Yes, interviewing is all about signs, from a candidate's point of view.

• I referred a friend of mine (at Director level) after the first in-person session. He didn't even hear back from these guys, not even with a rejection letter! He has more than ten direct and indirect employees reporting to him, so a little bit of respect could be the least. Like a simple "sorry we are not interested at the moment" would be the minimum, but alas...!

=== TO THE MANAGERS OF LYFT WHO MIGHT READ THIS ===

Everybody knows you have got $1.5B from Google's CapitalG in the past couple months to grow a lot, but putting wrong people in hiring not only would cause you an expensive opportunity loss but also can result in hiring wrong people, which can ultimately cost you way more!

On top of that, your reputation is going to be significantly damaged by these incidents. Silicon Valley is basically a small town, and negative experiences flow faster in mouths than the positive ones. Having a long-term vision (more than rushing to launch your service in the next city in this or that country), you definitely wouldn't want critical outsider people to start having a worse feeling toward your product and your team than toward your competitor!

TECHNICAL

• I was asked to implement JSON.stringify. (Ahem, ahem, creativity and novelty in the problem asked!)

• I finished that with unit tests in half an hour. Later, I found it was working way better than all the versions I could find online in random people's public GitHub accounts.

• The interviewer asked me to support recursive loops in JavaScript. He didn't even have a working example, and it was super tricky to think about it – an object having properties that point to the object itself to form a loop of "pointers" in JavaScript! I modified my code to cover that too. I tested it, and it worked perfectly.

• And guess what? The feedback (more than a week later) was that there were "some concerns about my JavaScript," so they needed a second phone interview. Lol. I could only laugh! I just bailed out and canceled it. Enough is enough.