Overall, this was a bad experience. Most of the interviewers seemed disinterested and lacked enthusiasm when discussing the company. Following the interviews, the recruiter ghosted. The only feedback received was a copy-paste rejection over a week later. Emails asking for feedback or a follow-up call were all ignored.

Coding Round The interviewer was fair. I just didn't complete enough parts of the question. The frustrating part was the 126 lines of markdown explaining the question. It's unreasonable to expect someone to parse through such a long problem description for a 30-minute task.

The problem was to split a string into major parts separated by the special character '/'. For each major part, we could further split it into minor parts separated by '.'.

Example 1

str = stripe.com/payments/checkout/customer.john.doe

minor_parts = 2

after Part 1 compression

=>

s4e.c1m/p6s/c6t/c6r.j2n.d1e

after Part 2 compression

=>

s4e.c1m/p6s/c6t/c6r.j5e

Example 2

Given:

str = www.api.stripe.com/checkout

minor_parts = 3

(after Part 1 compression)

=>

w1w.a1i.s4e.c1m/c6t

(then after Part 2 compression)

=>

w1w.a1i.s7m/c6t

Integration Round Two JSON files containing request logs of charges made on the Stripe API were supplied. The task was to write a function to test them by replaying the requests to a live API.

Part 1 involved comparing the HTTP status codes.

Part 2 required recording and comparing certain IDs between requests. This initially seemed simple, and I wrote the code to do it. However, it wasn't working, so I started debugging. The interviewer didn't seem to know what was going on either. With 2 minutes left, they mentioned something about the type of ID being different, such as a Customer ID versus a Charge ID. This was not mentioned in the problem description or in the Part 2 description.

Manager Round This was quite annoying. The manager's face was only about three-quarters in the camera. Like, dude, have you ever used zoom before? They were constantly yawning during the interview and asking unrelated follow-up questions to give the appearance that they cared.

String compression

Comparing API result and expected response.