Of the many tech interviews I've attended, this was one of the bad ones. The only good thing was the nice accommodation at the Marriott.

First, the hiring manager screens your resume and conducts a live coding Q&A session over HackerRank. Then, HR schedules an onsite interview. After asking for a free day in a week, they went on to schedule the flight whenever they felt like it, without asking my time availability on that particular weekday. Upon reaching Boston, they arranged a cab to the hotel and later back to the airport, which was really nice.

So, coming to the interview itself: Prior to the interview, they asked me to prepare a time-consuming presentation that lasts for an hour. This would take about a week to prepare. As part of the preparation process, I also needed to work with the hiring manager and incorporate their feedback into developing the presentation through incremental drafts. This took a lot of effort, and apart from my full-time job, I ended up pulling a couple of all-nighters during the week of preparation. All of this built up a lot of stress before the interview.

On the day of the interview, I had around 6-7 rounds.

1. First round: The hour-long, stressful presentation with the interview panel and HR. This is where I got really irritated to see the dull and uninterested faces when I gave my presentation, which took so much time and effort to prepare.

2. Second round: Sitting down with an engineer for hands-on programming, mostly involving debugging. This was easy for someone of my experience. This was the only interviewer who was engaging and at least showed some interest in assessing my skills.

3. Third round: An uninterested interviewer asked basic algorithms like merge sort and array searching. Easy as a breeze!

4. Fourth round: A hiring manager round, which was more of a discussion about how great MathWorks is, how they keep up with evolving technology, and why the manager stayed at MathWorks for 20 years, etc. The hiring manager was a nice, talented person but was ignorant of how bad the other developers on his team were.

5. Fifth round: A lunch round with the boss of the hiring manager. The lunch was nothing fancy, just a couple of pizza slices from the cafeteria. The interview was decent.

6. Sixth round: The interviewer was slouching on their desk with tired, sleepy eyes and just fired a question here and there, with long, awkward pauses. The interviewer's body language was demotivating. The questions were really basic (and of poor quality) for a software developer with five years of experience. Questions like the difference between a class and an object, the difference between a pointer and a reference, and why inheritance is used made me wonder about the quality of developers at MathWorks.

7. Seventh round: An interview with a web developer. Despite knowing that this was not a specialized UI role and that I am more of a systems (C++) developer, they went on to ask very detailed, syntax-oriented CSS questions like writing code to animate windows, designing margins for a page layout, and adjusting the relative width of a window with respect to its parent. Although I explained the concepts that answered the questions, the interviewer kept pestering me to get the syntax correct.

8. Last Round: HR asking standard behavioral questions like:

   • Tell me about a time you had to disagree with your team and how you handled it.
   • Tell me about a time you had the most difficult task assigned to you and how you accomplished it.
   • Tell me about a time blah blah blah questions.

All in all, the interview from 9 AM to 3 PM was exhausting, disappointing, and a low-quality experience. The interviewers looked uninterested and portrayed the impression that no matter how well I did, they were not in a mood to assess me and instead just wanted to get their 30 to 45-minute quota over with some basic questions they had likely googled.

After two weeks, involving multiple follow-ups to HR with no response, I did get a standard rejection email. It's a frustrating experience to get rejected after being asked such trivial questions in the interview.

Nice things about MathWorks:

1. The Natick Campus is really beautiful. The logo at the entrance is impressive.
2. The benefits, as explained by HR, are very good.
3. The company has an excellent diverse culture. Apart from the team I interviewed with, consisting of mostly Indian developers, I was able to see people speaking lots of different languages at the cafeteria during lunchtime.
4. Each employee gets a closed, full-sized office as opposed to an open cubicle.

Advice to MathWorks: Stop wasting candidates' time and effort with useless presentations if you are not serious about the hiring process.

Basic tech questions involving C++ debugging, algorithms, and data structures.