I applied directly. My initial contact was with HR, who presented a lengthy slideshow about Netflix culture. This was followed by a very light phone screen, which mostly consisted of JavaScript trivia, with a hiring manager. Then, I was invited on-site.

They were a bit disorganized. I was informed that only two interviewers were available for me and that I would need to return if the initial interviews went well.

The first on-site interview focused primarily on system design questions, which I found manageable.

The second interview involved a full implementation of an entire web front-end component, complete with markup. This required writing a significant amount of code by hand with a marker, which felt rather inconsequential. I struggled with recalling specific library functions off the top of my head, which seemed to annoy my interviewer. Typically, I "think out loud" during these types of interviews, but with something so rote, I had little to say while I was simply writing HTML on the board.

My interviewer showed little engagement in the process, eventually resorting to using his phone. While I suspect he disliked my component implementation, he offered minimal feedback.

After the obligatory "questions for you" phase, he bid me farewell and walked in the opposite direction of the lobby, leaving me to find my own way out. The experience felt unprofessional.

I had been expecting data structure and algorithm questions, the kind that lend themselves to whiteboard coding. Instead, they appeared more interested in JavaScript "gotchas" and library trivia. I don't see the practical benefit of such questions in an interview, but what do I know?

As a general observation, the cultural slideshow raised a few concerns about working at Netflix. However, at every stage of the process, no one was willing to provide answers to culture-related questions beyond simply regurgitating the information from the lengthy slide deck.

Completed implementation of an HTML front-end with full markup, all scripts, and tests. Done on a whiteboard in 20 minutes.