I was reached out to by an EM. We scheduled an informal pre-screening chat that went fine.

A few days went by, and I scheduled a screening with a recruiter and a different EM.

With the recruiter, you literally tell them your life story. This portion is called "Life Story". I’m a pretty open person, but the recruiter may interrupt you to ask irrelevant questions to feign interest, which throws off the flow. I think they want this to feel like an informal chat, but it’s an extremely invasive way to get to know candidates. It can turn into trauma dumping if you’re not careful. This goes on for an hour.

The remaining 30 minutes is a code challenge. I was given an object whose keys are city names. The value for each key is an object representing the inventory count for a given item in the city.

The other input for the function is an object whose keys are strings and values are numbers. This object is like an order request. You have to return each city that fully fulfills the order.

I’m not a fan of code challenges, whiteboarding problems, or riddles, and in spite of my preparation, I didn’t make it past this part of the interviews. No feedback was given outside of the generic “we went with other candidates” response.

Refer to the description above.