I was exploring some other remote opportunities, and I knew someone who worked at Stripe, so I decided to check things out to see if it might be a good change of scenery.

First, I had a phone call with a recruiter who told me about the company and the engineering teams. Then, they set up a technical screen that was conducted over Zoom (the format was "pair programming").

I did virtually no preparation, as the other responses on Glassdoor signaled that the technical interview question would be more of a real-world problem (server provisioning), and I figured there wasn't much I could do to ready myself for that. I was expecting to be evaluated on things like SOLID design principles, etc.

In the end, my technical interview focused on comparators, and most of the content of those questions felt like they might have come straight off a site like HackerRank or the like. Each question built off the last. None of it was particularly difficult, but I must say the format of the interview had me pretty nervous, and it was really tough to focus. Because the interview is only ~45 minutes long, you also don't have time to read through the specifics of any of the problems. The interviewer summarizes things, and you jump into implementing code that makes some tests pass, bouncing ideas and questions off the interviewer as you go.

I ultimately got hung up on one of the last questions we worked on, not because the question itself was particularly difficult, but the explanation was a bit fuzzy in the moment.

Overall, the experience was good. The interviewer was also very engaged and professional. I mostly kick myself for not taking the whole thing a bit more seriously. The technical problems ultimately didn't feel terribly relevant and likely wouldn't resonate with a lot of the day-to-day work of most developers (I've done full-stack dev for the last decade, building lots of complex systems, and I can't recall the last time I did work resembling this).

Comparators