Overall, the process was really involving and drawn out (gave a negative due to the amount of time needed from my side, and then proving coding/design ability and still getting rejected). Seemed like nice people, and the recruiter was outstanding in terms of coordination (a bit of hiccups early on) all the way to updating over the phone about the outcome.

Given a take-home assignment related to designing a multithreaded server with a set of functional, long requirements. It took about 8-10 solid hours for coding, testing, etc., weekend time. High-level requirements also needed reliability, throughput, etc.

The issue I had with the process is after tackling the hours-long coding exercise with skills in multithreaded design and getting positive feedback (have 10 years dealing with design and debugging multithreaded code) and testing for pretty high non-functional requirements, their onsite face-to-face still had some senior engineer asking me to write threaded code for printing numbers.

It tells that they want to screen as heavily as possible for false negatives for coding and design skills, or I'm not sure what they are testing for. And, the data structure/design problem was pretty heavy to their domain problem, which if you did not think about storing a function call stack in memory, you might not do well.

The design question was also pretty similar, very close to their domain problem, and the interviewer, I felt, was always not sure about any answers given; maybe not sure about what he/she heard, or maybe not happy with the answer. Was not helpful to carry the design conversation to where he/she was going with it.

The interviewers' communication style was confusing me as a candidate on what they were expecting to hear; it was bad. It seemed like he/she wanted to validate their confirmation bias on some design outcome.

Either way, if you don't want to spend days between the take-home (> 8 hours) and on-site proving your skills and then maybe getting rejected, don't waste your time with the process.

The people and culture aspect seemed outstanding, and like a very nice set of people. Managers seemed pretty thoughtful, seemed to care about the mentorship of junior engineers, but I think their input matters very little compared to engineers in the final outcome.

Design a data structure for storing a transaction trace (involving a tree for storing method sub-functions with statistics).

A multi-threaded TCP server with some requirements on reliability, throughput, etc. Needs understanding of socket programming, etc.

Design a system for keeping track of the health of a website with a streaming system design.