Overall, the interview process was disappointing. I expected a really high bar, but it seems like the new candidate recruiting process for engineering needs some work.

Recruiter: Great experience. Clear, succinct, and communicative. I was asked to come up with a test plan for a ride-sharing product. I spent a good 8 hours on this. My response qualified me to move on to the tech phone screen with the hiring manager.

Technical Phone Screen: The hiring manager came to the meeting 10 minutes late, with no notice. He was unprepared. He didn't assess any of the functional competencies that I had exhibited in my take-home and instead just jumped straight into an execution exercise. But when I began boundary setting, he impatiently told me to “just pick whatever you want to test and run through the tests.” Wow!

Things didn't get better when it came to behavioral questions. In one of my responses, I expressed a desire to work on automation testing, which was responded to with a flat, “I should only expect to stay a black-box tester at Robinhood.” Very inspiring.

I asked whether the “engineering team follows an agile or waterfall model?” He admitted that “everyone does their own thing”—wtf! When asked, “How does the team deal with tight development timelines?” No concrete response. “How does the team deal with escaped defects?” — “It's expected, sometimes we release untested features because of constraints.” Uh, isn’t this company SEC-regulated?!

Asked him, “Is QA involved at the outset of engineering intake?” A quizzical look, “no.”

After Q&A, he asked me to extend the 60-minute phone screen by 30 minutes. He made me wait 20 minutes before calling me back. When I asked when I should hear back from the team, he fumbled around because “it's a long weekend.” They ended up getting back to me two days late with a rejection.

How would you test X?