I don't know why I keep applying to this company. This was the third time I've applied over several years to various departments, and each time I canceled the interview process due to bad experiences or better job offers. This particular interview was similar to my prior interviews, but this one was especially poorly organized.

I had an hour and a half discussion that was broken up into two parts: hiring manager, Staff Engineer & a junior engineer (shadowing). The HM left the meeting during the technical part.

The HM asked an open-ended question about how I would work on a feature. For whatever reason, there was confusion by one of them regarding my answers, and I was interrupted several times to be asked questions I already answered. It was difficult to move forward in the discussion.

For the technical part, the CoderPad environment was not properly set up, so I was not able to do the problem in my preferred (allowed) language, which is a language this job uses a large part of the time. They offered almost no help, so I resorted to writing out the problem partly in pseudocode just to complete the task.

After the interview, I reached out to the recruiter and told them I'm not interested, so this is definitely the last time I'm applying. As much as I enjoy reading the NYT, the pay is really low, and the interview process is joyless.

Give an example of a feature you worked on, and describe the project management side of things, architecture choices, tech stack choices, metrics, etc. The tech round was a very, very easy coding exercise. All you had to do was hit an API, pull back the JSON, filter the data based on a few requirements, then hit a different part of the API with the filter data, and then print out what was returned. It's a no-brainer, but they did not have CoderPad properly set up, and they didn't know how to resolve it.