Step 1: An interview with a recruiter (which she forgot about; I had to email her to remind her to call me).

Step 2: Hiring manager Q&A: Very casual and information about the role.

Step 3: Take-home assessment: Create an executable which accepts an input like A, B, AB and returns the user IDs which fall into these categories.

Step 4: Five different interviews. The behavioral part consists of questions like 'Teach me a hobby of yours as if I have no idea what it is,' and 'Tell me about a time where you made a mistake and had to admit it.'

Even though the behavioral and technical parts went very smoothly and every interviewer said that they really liked my answers, and I finished the technical coding part in 20 minutes (given time: 60 minutes), the recruiter told me that they had not selected me.

I would say to those who consider NYT, especially software engineers: I would not waste my time. Apparently, they have some inside network, and it actually does not matter how well you do in the interviews. I was genuinely interested in the job and gave more than enough in every step of the process. Even the hiring managers and the interviewers conveyed incredibly good feedback.

Somehow, the recruiter told me that the team had not selected me after three weeks from the final interview and gave zero feedback.

So, briefly, do not waste your time. Go apply somewhere else which has a non-biased hiring process.

3 Technical parts:

A take-home assessment - categorization. System Design - Microservices. In-house coding - LeetCode easy/medium.

There were dictionaries nested; extract each value to print out the desired HTML tag. I had 60 minutes and completed it around 20 minutes, but they still didn't select me.