The interview process was generally fast and pleasant, but there was a sour experience at the in-person technical screening.

There was an initial 30-minute talk with an HR person, which was nice and informative, and the interviewer was fairly enthusiastic.

After this, there was an initial technical screening via a 90-minute HackerRank coding challenge plus some subjective free-text questions regarding technical topics. The difficulty was around medium, depending on how in-depth you answer the subjective questions. The topics were relevant to the position.

After this, there was a 60-minute technical screening talk with 2 developers. They screen you for your understanding of microservices, message queues, monitoring, etc., and might give a design or coding challenge in Codepad. The questions seemed quite specific in some cases. They seemed to be screening for specific experience and less for ability to learn or general fundamental understanding.

This part of the process wasn't well handled, in my opinion, and reflects some other experiences I've seen on Glassdoor. The interviewers didn't seem to have prepared at all – they didn't seem to know anything about me, they didn't have a specific process for how to proceed, nor had they synced with each other. They also seemed fairly annoyed, tired, and unenthusiastic. However, I hesitate to blame these specific interviewers at all; it just seemed more like they were not allocated any time to prepare or received any training on how to interview.

The interviewers making questions and a challenge up as they went along, and seeming to be tired/annoyed, caused a fairly unpleasant process. It was hard to understand questions or even understand if my answer was or wasn't what they were looking for, so I'd know to offer up an answer for another interpretation of the question.

My suggestions for anyone taking the 60-minute technical screening are to expect this sort of experience. Try to schedule your interview earlier in the day, take it upon yourself to specify loosely worded questions instead of trying to answer every interpretation of the question, and do not let the messy process get to you. I was thrown off balance by this process, started hectically answering questions in every interpretation, and started rushing because of this. I'm not surprised they didn't proceed with me after this. But in my case, I also wasn't the perfect fit for the position anyway – I didn't have previous experience with some of what they were looking for.

HackerRank Medium: Explain the tradeoffs of microservices etc.