I applied online. A recruiter contacted me shortly after to do an initial phone call (not on camera or anything). We discussed my experience, whether I had done more front-end or back-end projects, and what I was looking for in a role. It was very standard stuff.

After that, she sent me a link to set up the first technical interview. A note for others: you may want to use a computer to do this because their scheduling app is wonky and takes forever to load on mobile.

The next step was a coding interview using HackerRank. The interview instructions mentioned that you could set up your own IDE, but my interviewer went straight to sending me a link to HackerRank. I didn't have a strong preference, so I went with that.

As others have mentioned, the problem was given to me in multiple phases. The initial instructions were several paragraphs long. They were language-agnostic to a degree, which led to some confusion about the input format. Ultimately, it was decided after some questioning on my part that the arguments for the function would be given in the form of an array of strings.

Each string contained data like a datetime, ID, and credit card number separated by spaces. So, of course, parsing these strings to obtain the desired output was part of the problem.

The date/time string was in a strange format that I didn't recognize. They started with numbers ranging from 1-10. The interviewer asked me to sort the strings by these values. This involved taking slices of the strings, converting them to numbers, sorting, then converting back to strings and formatting with the appropriate data.

Then the interviewer asked how to make the code more performant, which I admittedly struggled with a bit.

To echo others' thoughts, my interviewer was definitely not paying attention for a decent amount of time. I was talking throughout the coding to make sure he understood my thought process and letting him know when I was using a resource like MDN to reference things. Using references is allowed. Using any AI like ChatGPT is not. However, I can guarantee this particular interviewer would not have noticed anyway. I had to repeat myself a couple of times when I was done with each phase because he wasn't paying attention.

At the end, I was able to ask the interviewer some questions about his experience at Stripe. He was pleasant and happy to answer. He was much more engaged in talking about himself, imagine that.

Overall, I didn't feel too bad about the interview, but it wasn't great. I doubt that this would have had any impact on my personal verdict as a candidate, but it was annoying to have the interviewer visibly disinterested. Before having the interview, I wondered if others were exaggerating this happening and perhaps bitter about not being moved forward in the interview process, but yeah. It happened, lol.

Either way, I still didn't feel extremely negative about it all. Based on reading lots of reviews as well as my interviewer's responses to some of my questions, the work-life balance does not seem to be great at Stripe. The impression I get is that they hire really good developers and pay them well, but don't expect to throw in some laundry in the middle of the workday.

And if you were to move on from this initial interview, there would be an all-day interview broken down into 1-2 hour chunks with things like system design questions and all the fun things these companies like to ask.

Take an array of strings, remove parts of the strings, and add words to them. Sort by a (strangely formatted) timestamp at the beginning of the string. Then, make it more performant. There could be other steps to add after this, as it's a layered problem and you're given information incrementally. Add any additional test cases.