Staff Software Engineer Interview Experience - Detroit, Michigan
Process
The interview process took a little under a month and consisted of an initial call with a recruiter and two panel-style interviews.
The recruiter conversation was pretty standard.
The first panel interview consisted of five-plus interviewers firing off what was mostly trivia-style questions in addition to asking about various points on my resume. In general, they were pretty disorganized, and there was more than one "moment of silence" where they clearly hadn't figured out who was asking questions next. A few of the interviewers had somewhat abrasive attitudes, and one of the interviewers in particular looked like he would rather be anywhere else. More than once, a comment was made that "Staff level is very high" from lower-level devs, which was giving me what almost felt like weird jealousy vibes. Someone having a hard time getting promoted, I guess.
The second panel interview again consisted of five-plus interviewers literally watching me fire up a basic front-end app and go through a number of junior-level "implement this" tasks with acceptance criteria. This experience went on for an hour and a half, with the panel barely speaking the entire time. More than half the panel looked like they were actually just doing other work during this time. Following that section was yet another disorganized series of random trivia and behavioral questions. Generally, the questions were easy. At one point, an interviewer threw in a random system design question with a link to a Lucidchart and no ability to edit it. There was no heads-up for this prior to the interview, and when the question was thrown in, we had roughly 15 minutes left, with 10 of those supposedly being for me to ask questions.
I received a downgraded offer within three days of the final interview, which I declined. The feeling I have is the dev group doesn't have a good idea how to interview for higher-level positions, so they essentially just give the same interview as they would for any other position with some arbitrary grading guidelines thrown in. Overall, it was one of the worst and most awkward interview experiences I've had to date.
Questions
Tell me the difference between RxJS's switchMap and map.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Rocket Mortgage Staff Software Engineer role in Detroit, Michigan.
Success Rate
Rocket Mortgage's interview process for their Staff Software Engineer roles in Detroit, Michigan is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.
Experience Rating
Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Rocket Mortgage's Staff Software Engineer interview process in Detroit, Michigan.
Rocket Mortgage Work Experiences
- 2.0Cultural fallacy & low payDatabase Engineer • Former EmployeeDetroit, MIAugust 26, 2024Pros: Entry-level positions, if you're young or have not that much going on outside of work, are good.Cons: Made-up job titles that don't match any industry standards and internal job seniority levels that either serve to keep folks at a lower pay range but tack on more responsibility or allow for vagueness in responsibilities that pigeonhole you to staying there and make it difficult to look for suitable and better-paying roles with other companies that have the same function. For example, a Business Analyst or Data Analyst may be called something else such as a Pod Review Support Specialist or Reporting Data Czar. The functions may be industry but the roles are not something that anyone outside of there would recognize. Given its vagueness, it allows for the company to set their own standard and range of pay, which is often much lower than other companies. They bank on the amenities and allure of the downtown Detroit area or false culture to get you to stay. This has fostered a toxic work environment. They talk about family and culture, but it's all surface-level at best. Furthermore, there is a push to embrace a "the only constant is change" mentality. This doesn't help when you have a faster change in leadership to where every new leader wants to change and shake up the status quo. Except the status quo never had a chance to kick off because the prior leader was only in the role for less than a few months. Their ISMs make sense, but overlap in theme and are not really followed unless it's convenient to push a bad idea through a business area. The only people that like it there are the people in charge or the people that don't know any better. The unfortunate part is they keep that ratio leaning to the people in charge side. You are not family and everyone is expendable at one point. You are conned into revealing personal parts of your life only for it to be used against you and as a way to keep you in an underpaid and overworked role.
- 4.0Good company, but slow growthSenior Software Engineer I • Current EmployeeJersey City, NJDecember 5, 2025Pros: - Good team leaders - Cutting edge technologyCons: - slow growth - no proper plan for career growth
- 3.0EnvironmentSoftware Development Engineer (SDE) • Current EmployeeChennaiOctober 7, 2025Pros: People are friendly. Pay is good.Cons: Diversity can be an issue. Language barriers exist.
