Overall, it was a mostly negative experience.

It seems to be a cast of B players looking for more like them.

There's such a strong emphasis on culture that it almost felt cult-like. The HR department is held in very high regard, presumably to reinforce cultural adherence.

If you're not into cults, you might want to stay away from this place.

I met two HR people (I can’t remember their titles now, but they sounded high and lofty), one recruiter, three software engineers, the manager of the team, and their director.

Both HR ladies gave a nice monologue about their culture and how great and unique it is. They didn’t really ask me much. This has to be the only place I’ve interviewed at that puts HR on such a high pedestal.

The technical interview questions were a mixed bag. The first guy wanted me to implement a ReadWrite lock, which I did. I love concurrency design patterns. I wanted to engage more and talk about RCU locks, fairness in lock acquisition, or cool ways of avoiding deadlocks in code, but the interviewer just looked away every time I said something that (I can only guess) felt like I was veering off his script. Ok, whatever.

The second technical guy’s question was a loosely defined problem of maintaining a distributed counter. I did my best to come up with a reasonable answer. The parameters of the problem were not really defined well. Can the system be inconsistent or not? Does the system have to be available or not? I ended up designing a CRDT type (accidentally) as I fumbled along. I got the sense that he didn’t know distributed systems well enough to articulate the problem in a way someone who’s not a mind reader could understand.

The third technical guy asked about implementing a hashmap and computing the max of an n-ary tree. Both were relatively easy problems. I solved both in what I thought was a reasonable amount of time. He was by far the nicest person amongst all of them. He had actually looked at my resume and complimented me on it, which I thought was really decent of him. None of the other people had even so much as made an effort to look at my resume.

After that, I met with the director of the team. The director didn’t seem all that interested in being there. I can’t remember him asking me anything substantial about my work or telling me about his team’s work. I’m not sure if he cared if I joined or not. Culture came up a lot, again.

The final interview was with the manager of the team the next day. He was remote, so we had to do it over Google Hangouts. This was by far the worst interview. He told me that the interview feedback from the previous day was positive, but one consistent feedback was that I was a “low energy guy.” Huh? I felt like Donald Trump had just hurled an insult at me. What is that even supposed to mean? I marched on regardless.

Then he sent me a diagram via email of boxes (supposed to be their client devices) connected to a cloud with a question mark in it, leading to more boxes (supposed to be the blackened boxes holding movies), and he said, “how would you solve this.” Solve what? For the next 20 minutes, I struggled to understand what the problem being asked of me to “solve” was. I asked what I thought were pertinent questions. What’s the update rate on the backend boxes? His answer: “Let’s say lots… high.” Me: “How high?” Him: “Let’s say 500 an hour.” Me: “That’s kind of low.” Him: “But how would you solve this.” Me (thinking): “What’s 'this'?” Me: “What’s the expected latency from the time someone requests something to the time you have to deliver it?” Him: “It doesn’t matter, how would you solve this.” Me (thinking): “Arrrggh.” On and on it went, and I could not understand what “this” was. The more he spoke, the more I thought, oh boy, this is just the kind of guy you don’t want as a manager.

The next day, they told me that they had decided not to continue. It wasn’t an unexpected response after that “interview” with the manager. Good riddance.