A recruiter reached out to me and mentioned that Wayfair is expanding in Toronto. He told me the package offered is very good compared to my current one, and I was interested.

Even though I had another offer at hand, the recruiter asked me to hold off, promising they would expedite the interview process. This process, however, still took two weeks. He also said I could hold the other offer for more than two weeks, which sounded fishy.

I agreed to hold off on my current offer as long as I could.

The tech screening was conducted by a company called Karat, which involved five quick design questions and one coding question.

After that, there was a virtual on-site interview consisting of four rounds, each lasting one hour:

1. System design
2. System design
3. Behavioral questions
4. Live coding The four interviewers were nice and mostly professional, and I have no ill feelings towards any of them.

I thought I performed well overall and had already rejected my current offer. Looking back, this was a foolish move. However, HR replied stating that I didn't pass, which surprised me as I had completed all the questions.

The reasons given were:

• I was among the first candidates interviewed in Toronto, and they were unsure of the overall candidate quality.
• I was unable to start the work on my own.

I doubt these were the real reasons for my rejection, and they don't seem valid to me. If they were unsure of the results after interviewing multiple candidates, they could have simply interviewed more and made a comparison; people can wait. Given they are establishing a new office in Toronto, it's likely they would need someone from the US for knowledge sharing or to bootstrap the project. Furthermore, based on what the manager said, this Toronto team is an expansion of an existing team, not entirely new. None of the interviewers mentioned the role requiring me to lead the project alone.

I wish I had received an honest explanation of where I fell short so I could improve. I would then be open to applying again in the future and would have even recommended the company despite my failure. However, with these rejection reasons, I will definitely reconsider their decision-making process.

Lastly, during the rejection phone call, I could barely hear what the recruiter was saying. For those interviewing for the Toronto office, please be aware.

System design questions:

1. Design a poor man's version of Foursquare, with check-ins and POI recommendations.
2. Design a parking system for guiding which spot a user can park based on their car size (compact, medium, full) and how they are charged over time.

Coding question (3 parts):

1. Use strings to add two big numbers.
2. Add thousand separators for both input and output.
3. Use your big number method to calculate Fibonacci.