I'd love to share my recent interview experience here, as I think it'll benefit future candidates in the community and would be good public feedback for the hiring team. I'll try to share my feedback respectfully and avoid very specific details about the interview questions.

It took 2 weeks between applying and receiving the initial email from the recruiter requesting to book a call. This is understandable, as the recruiter is likely processing a large number of applications.

The first round coding interview was scheduled 2 weeks later. From a candidate's point of view, this does feel like a very long time. My feedback to the hiring team is: please provide up-front ETAs and provide candidates with regular updates, e.g., 'we expect the whole process to take 4-6 weeks.' In my case, no ETA or updates were provided, so it just felt very slow.

The first round interview was to ask the candidate to identify a number of flaws in an existing implementation of a cache. I think this interview is poorly designed because it is framed as some very hardcore low-level algorithm problem. However, in reality, what the interviewer was looking for was to fix some basic software design issues. Fortunately, my interviewer reminded me a number of times not to overthink, and that guided me toward the right path. My feedback to the hiring team is that please frame the problem appropriately. What I heard is you ask candidates to re-implement a high-performance hash map, but actually, you just want to see if the candidate can spot code cohesion issues. My tips for future candidates are: please familiarize yourself with the 'thread' concept in C# or Java, e.g., how to make a piece of code thread-safe.

After passing the first round, the next and final phase is called 'panel.' During the panel round, there are 2 coding sessions and 2 system design sessions. The coding problems are actually quite hard. I tried using dynamic programming to solve one of them, but that didn't end up well, as I wasn't able to complete the solution. Now that I'm thinking, if I had just simply tried a brute-force way, maybe I could at least solve the problem. I felt my intention to try a more optimized solution didn't score me extra points, which is a bit disappointing.

For the system design part, I also feel that the interviewer had something in mind for how that system should be designed, and if you came up with something else, they don't seem to care much. This is unfortunately the nature of the interview setting; when they don't think you are good enough, they won't even be curious about your solution. The other thing I felt quite disappointed about is the interviewer is not trying to help me. In the last system design interview, the interviewer made the problem quite vague and refused to help me connect the dots. I ended up spending a lot of time wondering what he actually wanted me to do. Even this person was titled Staff Engineer, I felt his communication wasn't at a Staff Engineer standard.

My suggestion to the hiring team is: please mock-run your interviews with internal staff, check if they actually understand the questions you ask, and make sure all the people who conduct the interviews have good communication skills and are able to clearly communicate the problem to the candidate and help the candidate clarify.

Design a system to manage inventory of ads.