One of the most negative interview experiences in living memory. It feels like the process has ballooned and, as a result, the experience has significantly degraded.

First, I did a phone screen. This was a typical class design problem to solve a multi-part problem that builds upon itself. There was some light probing into algorithms and data structures, but nothing that was wholly unexpected. Code was expected to be able to be compiled and tested within the web IDE (always an additional hurdle, but understandable as long as the problem isn't too complex, which this one wasn't).

After this, there was a recruiter prep call where we went through a 10+ page interview prep document. I took some notes on this, but admittedly, with interviews going on at a half-dozen other places, it didn't feel like something that couldn't have been an email.

EXCEPT, on the day of the interview, I was surprised when I was expected to have a fully functioning environment using a build system of their choice in my IDE for the interview. They have an "integration" interview where the candidate is expected to write code that sends HTTP requests and parses some JSON from a file on disk in the language of my choice. Nothing that's too difficult to prepare for, but if you haven't explicitly prepared for it or have been working on that particular part of development, you'll have to navigate the libraries that they chose for you and the very, very cryptic clues that they give you in some poorly written sample code. This was just as miserable for me as for the interviewer, since we had to burn a substantial amount of time just setting up the environment. It felt like the prep document could have been less vague about what was expected beyond "integration interview," and it certainly could have been less dense.

This particular interview was very unfortunate from both sides, to say nothing of the other interviewers who uniformly looked like they had somewhere else to be and minimally engaged in collaboration, despite collaboration supposedly being an area of evaluation.

I would recommend for the company to really focus on candidate experience and to give clear, concise instructions for the explicit expectations of candidates and their build environment in a gentle reminder email either the day of or the night before interviews. A 10+ page interview prep document with a bullet point halfway through describing a critical component is not sufficient.

Cannot disclose due to NDA.