Very pleasant interviewers, but my software skills didn't cut it. I came away thinking that the people at Uber were very smart yet humble.

There was a one-hour phone screen. After the usual chit-chat about my resume, I was asked a programming question that I had to code and compile on Coderpad. The interviewer gave unit tests that I had to pass. Next followed a five-hour on-site interview in SF.

#1: Code a music player interface that stores a playlist and supports play, pause, stop, and next/previous track. Discuss how you handle hardware errors. You had to code all the classes and explain how messages were exchanged between them, justifying your choices.

#2: Design a CSV parser for strings containing double quotes and newlines. The result of the parsing should be returned as list<list<string>>, with one list per line. When a substring is within double quotes, commas within those quotes should be ignored. For example:

"a, b, \"hello,world\", xy\ne,f,g" should return:

a#b#hello,world#xy e#f#g

#3: Design an image-sharing application like Instagram, covering how to handle traffic spikes, storage, retrieval, publishing to follower feeds, caching, etc.

#4: A bar raiser interview asked you to describe how you scaled a graph database per your resume.

#5: A manager asked behavioral questions, such as "Why Uber?", "How do you mentor junior employees?", "Talk about a scenario where you took a risk and it either failed or succeeded.", and "What is your ideal job?"

The first two questions required you to write, compile, and pass unit tests on Coderpad. You could choose your programming language (C++, Java, Python, etc.). Question #3 was a whiteboarding exercise.