Screener call Hiring manager interview Two take-home HackerRank problems A systems design interview A behavioral interview

TLDR: One interview flaked on me, the recruiters left me hanging throughout, and they made me interview further and waste everyone's time despite failing one of their two take-home exercises.

Once I got into the deeper interview process, I found the recruiters, in particular, to be careless and content to let things go in a haphazard fashion. I was asked to do two HackerRank coding problems, each with a 90-minute time limit. They also wanted you to annotate the code with your thought process, provide your own test cases, and analyze the time and space complexity of the solution. Fine enough.

The first problem I did well and provided all of the details they wanted. On the second, I ran out of time. These were standard, overly academic algorithm challenges that we all know we never actually use in actual, practical software engineering work.

So I had two interviews scheduled the next week, and I clearly flunked one of the two problems. Usually, this would signify a failure condition, and they'd cut you loose. I emailed the recruiters to ask if we should proceed with the other interviews, but no one replied.

I showed up for my architecture interview the next week, and the interviewer did not show up. I sent a bunch of emails to figure out what was going on, and I eventually got text messages an hour late from a different recruiter at Qualtrics. Apparently, the interviewer went to the wrong Zoom link. He said he'd reschedule the interview for tomorrow but didn't clarify when or what he meant.

The next day, I went into the manager behavioral interview and was surprised to be told this interviewer would now also be doing the systems interview. OK, so this must be the systems interview, but we'll do the managerial one later, right?

Well, this interviewer asked a few tepid, superficial work history and behavioral questions and then crammed a pretty easy but somewhat strange systems design discussion. Then there was no further interview.

I asked the recruiters for clarification on what we were doing, and they said they were meeting to figure out the next step. Then, I replied, explaining I didn't understand what happened to this second interview that didn't happen and that no one made it clear that one interview was apparently going to encompass both. She replied to that, explaining what a systems architecture interview, seemingly misunderstanding my question. I replied to clarify, but she didn't respond.

Three days later, I got a generic form rejection email. It was all sloppy and kind of rude. I also didn't get a great impression of their "Delighted" company overall in the experience.

The coding exercises had a time limit on them, and I found one challenging and interesting. However, the ideal solution on the second problem was actually fairly difficult unless you're someone that studies LeetCode problems all the time. Of course, it's algorithmic academic nonsense that has no practical bearing on actual day-to-day work in any job like this.