All done online.

The initial screen was quick and efficient.

The full panel interview was not. The organizer asked for not one, not two, but three weeks of multi-day availability. This was pretty inefficient, so I proposed splitting that into two days instead. The organizer finally confirmed on a single day.

Two days before the panel interview, three out of five of the interviewers on the list changed.

When it didn't work out (even though my code worked in all technical questions), they only said, "misalignment of role and experience."

After spending a whole day (5+ hours), most companies would try to give a bit more feedback than that.

As a result, I didn't learn anything about my interviewing from spending five hours with them.

During an interview, a "Data Engineer" asked me to join two tables to label the start and end of a track play. Only after I proposed a working solution did he steer me toward another solution he had in mind, believing it was superior because it didn't require window functions. However, his solution did require them; he simply wasn't aware they were called window functions. Admittedly, the "Data Engineer" mentioned he hadn't worked on Spark in a while and is quite junior.

The two main algorithmic questions involved dynamic programming, requiring recursive implementations. These were similar but distinct questions, and they required me to do everything from implementing helper classes to writing actual test cases and printing results in an expected format. It was difficult to achieve 100% accuracy within the time limit (but I did it just in time).

How do you handle people criticizing your work?

How do you resolve conflict when you dislike the work done by another engineer?