I had an hour-long Skype interview with an engineer. The engineer showed up more than 10 minutes late to the meeting without any prior notice and started talking extremely quickly when the interview began. It was obvious he was really, really stressed out before the interview even started.

He then spent the next 30 minutes asking me about projects on my resume. Instead of having an intelligent, relaxed conversation, he was drilling me on the specifics of a project I had built at an all-women's hackathon. This was a project I had built in a single weekend with one other partner, so some of the design choices were understandably not the best (I still won an award for the project, though).

He was pretty condescending and even insinuated that because it was a women's hackathon, it was easier for me to win the award. I was pretty shocked, but I wanted to continue with the technical portion of the interview, which took up the next 30 minutes.

The technical portion was a straightforward tree problem that I nailed, but everything that could go wrong went wrong. The code-sharing link he sent me stopped working halfway through twice. I had to wait for him to find another platform, and we ended up switching between three different code-sharing platforms.

This wasted an incredible amount of time during the interview, and in the end, I think I was really only given about 15 minutes to solve the problem. I coded it up, explained my design choices, tested using edge and common cases, and explained the runtime and space complexity all pretty clearly and concisely, but didn't move on.

Overall, there were glaring problems with the interview process.

• The engineer introduced obvious, unfair gender biases during the initial conversation, a huge no-no with a technical company.
• He did not initially apologize for showing up late either, which is a simple human interaction flaw.
• He was really aggressive in drilling me, which is another simple conversation skill that the interview lacked.
• The coding platform was not tested beforehand, and he had to keep switching between platforms.

If the interview process is this sloppy, I couldn't imagine what being an engineer (especially as a female or person of color) would be like. Would not recommend applying to TripAdvisor.

Why do you think you won this award?

Is it because it was at a women's hackathon?