The interview process did not reflect well on the company culture and people, despite my positive initial impressions. It is the worst interview experience I've had this job search amongst 16 companies.

First off, the recruiter said my technical interview wasn't going to be a LC question and they valued practical coding. I prepped for practical coding interviews, but during the phone screen it turned out to be exactly one of the classic LC questions. The interviewer was not only super disengaged (mostly silent during the interview), but also came off super arrogant, which triggered a mild panic attack that contributed to me not performing well.

The entire system design interview happened on Google docs. I was not prepped on this either, so I spent most of the hour wondering when we would switch to Excalidraw. The system design interviewer was cordial, but it was also a bit chaotic trying to nail down all the requirements. I remember being met with skepticism when I told them that a Postgres DB should be able to handle 30 RPS of search queries. The skepticism was so palpable that for a second I thought I had messed up somewhere, but in hindsight I believe it's because I didn't say the answer they were expecting and the assumptions around scale that we've agreed to painted them into a corner where simpler technological solutions could satisfy the requirements.

I really want to believe my interview experience doesn't reflect the inner-reality of the culture at Retool, but given the interview experience, I fear that this interview experience would turn away good people whom I would want to work with.

LeetCode Medium on arrays