The first step was a phone screen with a recruiter, just standard behavioral and “why do you want to work here?” questions. The next step was a behavioral and technical interview with a senior engineer.

The interviewer was pretty friendly overall but clearly did not like some of my answers (I work at a smaller company and we don’t necessarily follow all the best practices, though I described what best practices are. Lesson learned about being honest).

The recruiter had told me the LeetCode problem would be medium, but it seemed closer to easy. I went over time a bit (though we got started late), and I had to look up some syntax I don’t use regularly. The stated purpose of the exercise was to “see how I think,” but we all know that it looks better if you just solve it without looking much of anything up, and I’m sure others solved the problem more quickly. I got a rejection email the following week with no specific feedback.

The next step would have been a 5-hour virtual onsite, which I was kind of dreading anyway, especially given that I was being moved forward by other companies with equally rigorous but less time-intensive interviews. Some of what the interviewer told me about the division also gave me pause. Again, the interviewer was quite nice. While I think watching someone solve a LeetCode problem yields information that’s about as useful as a die roll and in fact tends to select for undesirable traits, it would not have been a good fit, and I appreciate that the interviewer was upfront about the company’s successes and challenges.

The task was a LeetCode easy to medium problem.