I too was a victim of the NYT interview process. I went through all the rounds: 8 in total. I enjoyed meeting everyone in the interviews. The only negative was the recruiter, who was late or missed meetings. They then strung me along for over two weeks, while it was clear they were interviewing someone else and thinking they wanted to hire that person instead. I kept being told, "We are very excited about you as a candidate and hope you'll wait to hear back from us." I stupidly thought I was getting an offer, but now, in hindsight, they just needed more time to finish interviewing someone else. The recruiter even lied and said that they had a lot of decision-makers call out sick one week (to buy themselves more time). Then, to add insult to injury, after all those weeks of waiting, I got a form rejection email. Not even personalized. I asked for feedback and never heard back. Just a horrible process that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

Front-end system design, and two easy LeetCode questions that involved object/array iteration.