Samsara's recruiting team was very nice and friendly. The screening interview was a good dialogue between people. The process moved along at a good pace.

The problem was their one-on-one technical phone interview. The interview was scheduled for 45 minutes, but the interviewer was 15 minutes late. He apologized and assured me that I would get the full time to answer the questions. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be grateful.

That wasn't what concerned me. The interviewer also seemed inexperienced with the interview process. He didn't understand how to use the coding tool we collaborated through and didn't know how to call me, even when I suggested it would be easier to use my headset on my computer instead of holding the phone in my hand. This happened even though the recruiter had told me what tool they would be using and how they would be using it.

I ended up coding with one hand for some of the time, and then awkwardly holding my phone between my shoulder and ear for the rest.

The questions themselves were not difficult. Due to the interviewer's inexperience, he wanted to over-explain the problems, often interrupting my thought process. To be fair, he was just trying to be nice and was eager to help. But because we didn't know how to use the tool very well, it was hard to debug code.

At the end, I ended up running out of time. I wasn't sure how many more sections there were, but he said I had reached the end (though I suspected I had not).

To be fair to the interviewer, he seemed nice and was eager to help, but he clearly didn't have the expertise to interview people. He wasn't accustomed to thinking patterns that differed from the ones he was used to, and so could not anticipate where to help and where not to help.

As expected, I did not receive an offer, which was probably for the best for me. My advice is that if Samsara wants to hire a diverse team, they need to be ready to understand a diverse set of thought patterns. Also, they must know how to use their interview tools.

It was a layered test, built to test your understanding of OOP, Enums, and basic algorithm thinking.