I should have read interviews here before I agreed to an in-person interview. I saw a Craigslist ad and sent in a resume, not really expecting to hear back. A Netflix recruiter called; I called back and spoke for 15 minutes. A few days later, I spoke to a Netflix HR/recruiter. Then, I had a 45-minute phone interview with an engineer who mostly talked about my resume and experiences without any technical questions. He told me that he was going to recommend me for an in-person interview, and a few days later, an in-person interview was arranged.

During this time, lots of companies were conducting interviews, even in-person ones, but very few offers were being made. Companies were in shopping mode, not hiring mode.

I looked on Glassdoor and was dismayed that this in-person interview was probably going to be a stressful waste of time. But I reviewed the 100+ slides on the Netflix site about culture (which was interesting) and the slides on the Netflix business case.

I met with two engineers first for about 45 minutes, and we discussed my resume. They showed me a screenshot and asked me to describe how I'd code it up and what issues to consider. They asked me to code up a contains() function in JavaScript on the whiteboard, which determines if one element contains another element. Then, they left, and another engineer interviewed me for 45 minutes. He asked me to add the contains() function to all elements in the system (e.g., HTMLElement.prototype). He also asked me to write the HTML and CSS for a layout with a header, a content pane, a navigation pane, and a footer (memorize this solution! This question is asked at many companies).

I met the HR person for 45 minutes, where we discussed Netflix culture (kind of). I brought up various concepts from the culture slide deck (I thought it was interesting), but she parroted back the concepts; maybe it wasn't interesting to her. Finally, I talked to the director, where he asked what ideas or thoughts about the Netflix site I had, and then we had a super in-depth discussion about A/B testing on those ideas and thoughts.

Most everyone was nice, and for sure, everybody was respectful. But I got clues that Netflix wasn't hiring much and that they could even wait up to a year for the perfect candidate, possibly interviewing dozens of candidates. The HR person also made a big fuss about how Netflix hires people who are an exact fit, so they won't hire, and you shouldn't accept unless everybody is 100% sure that the job was a perfect fit for you. I think they knew that I was a no-hire before the end of the interview cycle, but they did wait a day to let me know. That was a nice thing to do. I asked about reapplying but, frankly, don't think that I'll ever do that.

Write a contains() function in JavaScript.

Enhance the contains function to make it part of the JavaScript system (e.g., HTMLElement.prototype).