I had an initial 30-minute chat with a very pleasant recruiter. They described the rough overall process, which is supposed to contain two technical coding rounds, followed by some pair programming and bug-finding rounds.

For potential interviewers at this company, I urge you to practice your coding speed, because this was literally the only thing the interview seemed to be looking for. As someone with over 10 years of industry engineering experience, I certainly did not find them interested in any aspect of my engineering ability, but rather, speed and speed alone.

The interviews were 1 hour, and I was presented with a 45-minute verbal countdown by the interviewer, which felt like being on "Chopped." As I coded through a rather basic OOP problem, I could hear the interviewer telling me how many minutes I had left, which was a supremely odd experience. If I had named every single variable "foo" and "bar," and not bothered writing tests the proper way, it would have actually benefited me, because that would have sped everything up. However, at that point, I had been through a few interviews at other companies for industry hires that always valued process more than speed alone, and I failed to adjust to this new process.

The interviewer spent 5 minutes small-talking with you, which was standard. Then they presented a coding exercise, which to me was quite simple. Due to an NDA, I can only describe the problem as similar to parsing JSON-like NoSQL database objects and doing some basic data structure manipulation. The follow-up question was also rather simple, but I was literally between 2-5 minutes short on time, and the timer ended (with the interviewer counting down the last minute as I coded).

Needless to say, from their point of view, I "failed" the process. I have nothing bad to say about the interview process, since I firmly believe that engineering is about working with constraints, and in this case, the constraint was a 45-minute countdown, "Chopped" style. I will say that this is an industry-wide concern: to this day, we as an industry still think the best way to hire an engineer is to treat every interview as an IOI competition.

Parse a JSON-like NoSQL data structure and perform basic data manipulation.