I was contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn. I had heard about the company and had done some research. Having read the reviews on here, it sounded like a great place to work. As I was employed at the time, it took a little while to get time to interview. After coordinating with the recruiter, I was able to take a 30-minute phone interview with an employee that had been there for years. He told me about what he did there and asked about my previous experience. Everything went really well. After which, I scheduled an interview about a week and a half after the call. I was told that the interview process would take 3 hours.

The day of the interview, I arrived on time and was able to find the office fairly easily. After I had filled out an NDA, I was informed that the recruiter was not there but was busy attending to personal errands. So, the first group of people that I was meeting with showed me around and took me up to a common area with a whiteboard. This interview was about database design and optimization. And one of the first things they asked me was if I had been a DBA. Nowhere on my resume do those three letters appear in that order. I was a bit confused about where they would get that idea but wasn't too concerned. At first, they asked me to design a database to store information for a library, which I thought went alright, since I'm not a DBA. Then they started asking questions about scaling and data-warehousing and how my design would deal with X number of items. I answered the questions to the best of my abilities, but not coming from a DBA background, things could have gone better.

After spending an hour with this group, I met with the second group. This group was focused on programming. They explained that they would start with some simple questions and move on to more complicated questions. Their first problem was to find the first occurrence of a word in an array and to remove it using whatever language I preferred. This was a fairly simple problem and, besides a few minor mistakes, I felt like my solution was good. They were interested in seeing how I solved problems and that I could write code correctly on the whiteboard. The second question was the same but allowing for multi-dimensional arrays. For this, I took a recursive approach, re-using as much of the previous code as I could. In this instance, I did really well. I noticed a few bugs before the interviewers and though I really nailed it. After these first two questions were answered, they moved on to a different problem. The problem was to represent a cube and be able to determine if two cubes were the same. The cubes could have any number of colors associated with the faces. This problem was a little tougher, but eventually, after trying a number of solutions, we came to the agreement that my solution would suffice. After this question, there was a Q&A session between me and them. They explained what they do and answered any questions that I had about what they do there. I thought this part of the interview went really well.

On to the final group. This group was the API group. They asked me to design an elevator system from the ground up, including an API with which to interact with the database objects and some sample code to determine how to respond to a request from a button push. This part of the interview was a bit uncomfortable. I don't have a lot of experience with API development but struggled through trying to solve this problem. One of the interviewers was really helpful and talked through a lot of the problems and discussed how to resolve the problems with me. The other interviewer probably said 5 words total and seemed like he was disinterested. Needless to say, this part of the interview didn't go great. It was a little awkward, to be honest.

After this last part, I was supposed to meet with the recruiter, who incidentally was still not present. So I sat around for about 10 minutes, at which point the "Director of Technology" met with me briefly. He explained that at Qualtrics, they didn't really believe in titles, and we mostly talked about non-work-related things. We also talked about what the company does and what he was in charge of and his job history. Overall, this part of the interview was really chill, and I'm still not exactly sure what the point of it was, but I enjoyed it.

Overall, I thought the interview went fairly well. I was completely unimpressed with the recruiter, who I never even met with, but was looking forward to hearing back within a few days. Needless to say, the recruiter was once again a disappointment on this front. After a week, I decided to email and ask what was going on, which took a day and a half to get a generic 'No Thanks' email. I think this would be a great company to work for, but to this day, I'm not even sure what position I was actually interviewing for or what the requirements are.

Design an elevator API, including database design, using a whiteboard.