I initially applied in early November 2013. I received a reply from one of the recruiters about a week later.

After talking to the recruiter on the phone and emailing back and forth for a while, she realized I was still in school (graduating mid-2014) and transferred me to another recruiter. Or rather, a bunch of different recruiters who couldn't seem to figure out who I should be talking to.

Eventually, we got everything sorted out (now in January 2014) and I had two phone interviews. They both went well, and shortly after, they arranged for me to fly to Seattle for a "university day". They put me up in a nice hotel across the street from the office and, of course, paid for meals and everything. They even set up direct deposit for the reimbursement, which was nice.

The day of the interviews, I arrived in the morning and signed in. Then I was met by a couple of recruiters. There were also a few intern candidates but no other full-time candidates.

I had three interviews, all of which were fairly interesting:

• The first was mostly a fit interview.
• The second was an in-depth coding interview.
• The third was a combination of talking about experience and doing some coding.

After the interviews, we toured the office and then met with a bunch of engineers for a Q&A session. This was a really great way to learn about the company and see how everything worked there. It seemed like a great place to work with many smart engineers, though I was mildly concerned about the apparent lack of organization.

In the afternoon, one of the recruiters took us downtown for Seattle's "Underground Tour", which was really neat. Later, they took us out to a super fancy Italian restaurant, which was excellent. Overall, it was a great day.

About a week later, I received an email from one of the recruiters asking for references and my transcript. I have an almost perfect transcript (straight A's) and was certain my references would say nice things about me, so I felt the job was in the bag at this point.

One of my references forwarded me the questionnaire they sent him. It contained generic questions like "How did you know him?", "Would you hire him again?", and "What were his strongest/weakest attributes?". This reference included his answers, which were all extremely positive, reinforcing the idea in my mind that I was going to get an offer.

A week or so after this, I heard from the recruiter again, asking me to do more phone interviews. Supposedly, it was "great news that [they] still [wanted] to move forward with [me]", but I didn't really take it that way. Frankly, I found it rude and unprofessional that they would waste the time of my references if they weren't already prepared to make an offer.

However, I, of course, went through with the phone interviews, uncertain what they could possibly learn about me that they hadn't already figured out in the first five interviews.

The first of the second round of phone interviews (the 6th interview overall) went very poorly, as the interviewer had a strong accent and a horrible phone line with lots of static. I could barely understand what he was asking, which made it very difficult. I contacted the recruiter about this, and she seemed at least somewhat understanding. She then booked another phone interview, which went quite well, as far as I could tell.

Finally, the week after this (now into March), I received a rejection letter, which I was rather dumbfounded by. I couldn't figure out where I went wrong or why they would bother contacting references if they weren't prepared to make an offer.

I signed an NDA, so I'm not sure that I am allowed to talk about it.

Mostly fairly general questions, e.g., data structures and algorithms.

Sometimes there's an emphasis on large data.