I applied on the Quora website. The interview process began with a HackerRank online assessment, featuring a question similar to the '3 Sum' problem. Next was a one-hour phone interview, which I did not feel I performed well on. I was unwell that day, and it was also difficult to understand the interviewer at times. Despite this, they still invited me for an on-site interview, so somehow I passed.

For the on-site round, they flew me in the day before the interviews. The travel booking was seamless, the communication from the HR who arranged my interviews was very clear, and the hotel was nice. Everything was good so far.

The on-site round itself was the opposite. I had three technical interviews back-to-back with no breaks in between. The HR who gave me the office tour was very friendly, but the first interviewer seemed to dislike me from the very beginning. He was abrupt and condescending, and interrupted me so much that I believe this could have been a test to see how I react to pressure. If it was, I failed, because that interview shook me, and I felt completely thrown off for the rest of the interviews.

After the third interview, another HR approached and informed me that a conflict had arisen with the next interviewers, and therefore my interviews were concluded. They did not state it directly, but it was clear to me that they ended them early because I was not performing well in the interviews.

I did not test well that day, so I cannot say they were wrong. Their algorithms and coding questions were comparable to those I encountered at Facebook, Dropbox, and Google, which I do not find especially difficult, as I passed and received offers from all three. There was also a practical exercise involving debugging failing test cases in an existing codebase, which was unlike any interview I had taken before. However, I feel the main reason for my failure was that I simply could not think straight after that first interview, and my lost confidence caused me to bomb the next two.

I genuinely like Quora, so I hate to say this, but I would not recommend interviewing with them. This is not because I did not receive an offer or because I performed poorly on the interviews, but because I feel they do not treat candidates with consideration. Because my interviews were ended early, I ended up dedicating two whole days of my life to fly to San Francisco, only to spend less than three hours interviewing with them. I did not even receive a free lunch, which was disappointing as I had heard their food is very good.

But even if I had passed the interviews and been given an offer, I do not know if I would have accepted it. The interviews were all very one-sided, with them testing me but not providing any insight into why I would want to join them. During the on-site stage, I never met the hiring manager and only had time to ask a total of four short questions to the three interviewers. It is a shame because I think I would prefer a smaller company, and of all the smaller tech companies, Quora seems like one of the better ones.

OA was a 3 sum question.