I've gone through this process twice now and probably won't ever again. I don't know if I'd take an offer here even if I had received one. It would have to be very high compensation, as the Palo Alto office is subpar.

Second time:

• Two phone screens.
• Onsite interview with approximately five technical interviews.

What was peculiar was that I was interviewing almost directly with the team I would be working with. I didn't realize that until the end. I didn't even truly know the exact position until I met the hiring manager at the end, which I found out because he told me – there was no information provided upfront.

Almost all whiteboard questions – I'm not complaining, as that's normal. I don't think I interacted with a single American throughout the entire process, which was strange. And I do mean American. There was a white gentleman in my "group lunch," but he wasn't from the U.S. This speaks to the type of people hired at Uber, I suppose.

One odd note here as well: My main lunch interviewer was also a whiteboard interviewer later that day, but I was never informed of this. That's unusual.

The questions themselves were all LeetCode medium to hard, except for one, which was closer to an easy. It felt like that question was included for some arbitrary reason. In fact, I wouldn't expect candidates to have even arrived at the optimal answer for the first question unless they had recently reviewed a specific data structure, like an LRU cache.

The questions themselves weren't the main issue. Honestly, I don't know why I didn't get an offer because some of the people seemed to genuinely like me, and from my recollection, I did solve all the questions with optimal answers. For that first question I was asked, I provided the optimal solution verbally immediately. The interviewer seemed a bit surprised but then immediately asked me not to solve it that way. I responded, "Uh, okay... So you want me to do a non-optimal solution?" He probably assumed I had seen the problem before, but I hadn't.

Overall, I wasn't emailed anything until I reached out to them a week later. Since Uber provides absolutely no feedback after the interview, I will be declining any further interviews with them in the future. I would strongly recommend you don't bother with this place. I only interviewed here for practice before my interviews at "big N" companies, but now it's just pointless. They'll take up the entire day, and you could spend that time more efficiently on LeetCode. There are other companies I can interview with that have similar processes and will actually provide feedback when you don't receive an offer.

There was an underlying feeling of racism and/or xenophobia that I perceived with some individuals. I won't delve too deeply into it, other than to say it was strongly felt in at least one of my interviews. If you've lived in the Bay Area, you know the feeling I'm referring to. Racial tension is high here. It's not new, but it's just annoying that Uber hasn't implemented significant bias training for this.

MapReduce large log files to get X amount of random lines, managing a pool of IPs, rotated array search.