The interview process was lengthy, with too many phases. The questions themselves were easy. Slow recruiters were the biggest issue.

The process consisted of:

• A phone call with the recruiter
• A phone call with the hiring manager
• Two phone calls/technical screens with the engineers
• An on-site day of interviews (five sessions) - in my case, this was in Los Angeles
• A second on-site day of interviews - in my case, this would have been in Los Gatos

I applied out of curiosity to a Full Stack SDE position in their Marketing department, while being a Principal SDE at a public company. It took about five days for their recruiter to contact me for a first chat.

Then, we had a phone call with their engineering manager. She described the team, checked my soft skills, and asked for my thoughts about their five-page culture article. It took the recruiter eight days to update me about the results.

Next, we had a technical screening phone call consisting of two sessions, each 30-45 minutes long. In each session, two engineers asked me to do coding tasks in Coderpad. The tasks were primitive – refactor some code, write a couple of tests, and give an example of an XSS attack, etc.

After that, I was invited to the Netflix office in Hollywood for a day of interviews. The area looked quite bad for living, working, or commuting.

I got both positive and negative impressions from the on-site interviews. I liked meeting the hiring manager and two engineers, while I didn't like meetings with the project manager and the second recruiter (they seemed like "robots"). Also – lol – my host just abandoned me.

First session: a technical interview. Their SDE gave me a task to whiteboard. He answered a couple of my questions. Then, he ran away fast after the interview, but overall, he was engaged and invested in the process.

Second session: a talk with the engineering manager again. Questions about my ideas on how to deal with people and situations, etc. She gave me a technical task to whiteboard. I asked her my questions, and the answers aligned with my views. The only questionable thing is that the manager seemed to be an unneeded layer, as all my questions on how she helped developers resulted in "developers are very independent and should solve everything themselves." So, her role was just about hiring new people and signing salary checks. But the discussion was overall useful, and she was an interesting person.

Third session: a technical interview. An SDE gave me a coding task to whiteboard. Then we had a long, forced chat on different topics regarding life at Netflix. Basically, my host lady met me in the morning and said she would come after the third session to show me the office and get some snacks. The SDE was hopelessly trying to locate her via Slack, and when it failed, we had to talk with him until the next interview. I got insights about life there. Some stories were questionable – e.g., how the first SDE I met that day spent a week changing a properly working build process to use a different tool because he personally liked it more (the story was provided to glorify the productivity of Netflix folks but looked like a waste of time and money).

The fourth interview seemed like a chat with a "robot" – a mechanical walk-through of a list of soft-skills questions.

The meeting with a second recruiter finished the day. Again, a "robot-like" style of questions about soft skills and experience. Well, the person was alive, but seemed to have a professional deformation from working as a recruiter for like ten years already. He was asking the list of questions he had to ask, smiling to play his role, and laughing when he needed to laugh. He was not interested much in the process. He happened to be the most flawed link in the chain of interviewers. He promised to give me the results in like three days – which never happened.

Seven days later, that recruiter emailed me to find some time to talk. All those attempts failed. First, he didn't read my email response until the next afternoon (one should believe that Netflix recruiters do not read emails in the morning). Then, he failed to call me on the day he scheduled the call and didn't even follow up the next day. I had to contact the hiring manager and the other recruiter. Only after that – ten days after the on-site interviews – did I get an email stating that I didn't pass due to over-complicating solutions to the tech tasks, and also due to some concerns regarding my culture answers.

My conclusion regarding the tech results: kids, do not show all your knowledge to Netflix; rather, solve the tasks in the easiest manner. Regarding the culture questions – it is up to Netflix to decide what answers they like.

To summarize:

• Liked: The strong language of their culture doc, the tasks and scale, meeting the team members (not just some unrelated engineers).
• Didn't like: Working with the second recruiter (uhhh...), the chat with the project manager, and the LA area of the office (traffic, congestion, appearance).

You're working on a video editor and need to show events (identified by start and end timestamps) in swimlane tracks. A single track cannot contain overlapping events. Implement an algorithm that receives an array of events and outputs a list of tracks (arrays), each containing the events that should be shown on that track.

Design a system that can process N types of jobs (e.g., job of types A, B, C, etc.). The pipelines of jobs per type should be independent, meaning a long-running job A should only block the queue for jobs of type A, not the queue for jobs of type B. The results from each type of job queue should be delivered in the order of input.

Walk through a directory-like structure, outputting the names of folders and files. Each folder and file should be indented according to its level from the root. Additionally, display the total number of files it contains directly beneath it.

Example:

docs(3) -marketing(3) --october(2) ---file.doc ---invoice.doc --november(1) ---new_invoice.doc -publications(0) screens(1) -screen1.png