A recruiter contacted me a couple of weeks after I applied. Their schedule was booked solid for three weeks, but they were able to pencil me in sooner, as I was interviewing elsewhere too. The initial recruiter chat was terse; it was clear the recruiter was speeding through their script as fast as possible, but that's fine because, after all, they had to squeeze me in. It sounds like they're interviewing a lot of applicants.

I received a link to a plethora of Snap resources on the interview process. It gave me a lot of encouragement, and overall, it felt like they had a robust system for screening candidates.

The screening proved that very wrong.

The interviewer was simply rude. He was not paying attention at all during the interview. He asked me token questions about my experience but kept interrupting me whenever I mentioned a particular tool he had a gripe with, wasted my time with his own diatribes, and then moved on to his next question before I could continue answering the prior one. When the actual technical question came up, he completely checked out. He was not listening to me at all but would occasionally interject to ask me to do something I had already done. (It was a simple graph traversal, but he asked me three separate times where the 'seen' set was. It was like it was three lines above my cursor most of the time; it was named 'seen' for goodness sake! What were you doing?)

I tried to explain my thought process step-by-step as well when answering the question (something Snap's interview guides strongly encourage), but literally after my third sentence, he interjected with, "You should do DFS." Like, yeah mate, I'm getting to that. With ten minutes remaining, he scoffed that my solution was a little inefficient (it was—two passes when I wanted to combine them into one). Even though we had ten minutes left, when I told him I wanted to make it more efficient, he told me off and said we were done with the technical part. When I asked him several questions about his team at Snap, he mostly focused on random tools he didn't like.

The interview was an insulting waste of my time and a blunt rejection of the values and processes Snap claims to hold dear. If an interviewer wants anything from the candidates they screen, it's clear to me that all they're looking for is an immediate regurgitation of the optimal LeetCode solution. Even if the problem is easy for you, if you take a single second to map out your thought process, you're doomed. Instead, I recommend memorizing LeetCode and indulging your interviewer's soapbox.

Behavioral questions included "tell me about yourself" and "give me a situation where you had to take the lead on something."

Technical questions involved a simple graph traversal problem where the graph was represented as a matrix.