Straightforward interview process: pair coding, then systems design.

The coding is nothing hard, very basic OOP. For date calculations, he argued why I would need a commonly used library like moment. I had to explain issues of leap years and daylight savings, and other caveats that are not addressed in standard date libraries. He finally admitted I had a point after some debate. One would think Stubhub would be more conscious of date and time, given the timeliness of tickets.

These coding exercises were more aimed at new engineers; nothing hard, just testing your speed at easy tasks.

The system design interview was even easier. A email service to send off batch emails within 5 minutes of noon. A lot of the follow-up questions had nothing much to do with systems design, like market measurements of a successful campaign. However, if he wanted to talk about business analytics, he should know the lingo of reads, reach, and point of sale.

I do see where they were going with the questions. It's just a bit sad of a missed opportunity they had with an engineer with 20 years of experience, who has had success solving much greater problems than those presented. However, this interview is not that much worse than most. They want to measure how quickly you can understand their stupid questions and your typing speed.

1. Write code to find events local to a customer.
2. Design an email service to send emails to a few million subscribers within 5 minutes of noon.