I applied to a job listing online and heard back from a recruiter within a week.

We scheduled a chat with the recruiter, and I went over the position and interview process (1-2 phone screens, depending on performance, and an onsite).

I had my phone interview a week after that with two engineers. One was shadowing and didn't contribute to the interview.

We spent the first 10 minutes or so chatting about the work we've been doing at our respective companies. After that, the interviewer gave me a CTCI-type question, although not one directly from the book.

I came up with and coded a slightly inefficient solution in about ten minutes, performed a space and runtime analysis, and spent the rest of the time optimizing it. The interviewer was friendly and encouraging, offering hints when I got stuck. We eventually arrived at the optimal solution.

The interviewer was not too concerned with running code, as it's easy to get tripped up on random compiler errors in that sort of environment. They mainly seemed to care about the algorithm.

He ended the interview by asking "Why Uber?" and opened up the last five minutes for my questions.

The recruiter was very prompt, getting back to me a couple of hours later with next steps. We scheduled an onsite for a week and a half later.

She was also open to giving feedback when I asked for more information on areas I could improve for the onsite.

The onsite included five sections:

• Hiring manager
• Coding
• Software design
• Architecture
• Uber culture

All interviews started with around 10 minutes of introductions and ended with 5 minutes of open Q&A.

Every section, with the exception of system architecture, included coding on a whiteboard.

Since this was my first interview, and I had no idea what to expect with design and architecture, I struggled a lot during those sections.

When I admitted I didn't have much experience or familiarity with certain topics during those interviews, the interviewers tended to drill down into those areas, expecting me to make educated guesses (despite not having anything on which to base those guesses).

One interviewer also seemed impatient when I tried to ask clarifying questions, continuously 'dumbing' down the original question or interrupting me when I tried to reason things out.

By the end of the day, I was feeling pretty exhausted and discouraged. I got tilted on a relatively simple recursive problem that I figured out after walking out of the building.

The recruiter got back to me less than a week after that with feedback and a rejection.

What would you do to improve Uber?