The first interview was the typical phone screen with a recruiter. Why you want to leave your company, why us, etc.

The next round was a pair programming exercise in HackerRank. I didn't pass it, but it was an interesting problem, closer to a real-life problem than most LeetCode-type questions.

My biggest problem with the interview mirrors the experience of another applicant, where they give unnecessary advice. Instead of asking if you could spot the mistakes in line X, they would go on to say you made a mistake and then offer a long explanation of why it wouldn't work. But the mistakes were silly ones that you make when you're coding under pressure, and immediately noticed and fixed when pointed out. There was no need for full explanations, which didn't give me a chance to show that I understood what the problem was. It felt a bit like one of the interviewers in particular was just stroking his own ego, but I don't think that was his intention. Overall, they were both nice, but the constant tips were more annoying than helpful.

Their feedback was fair, however. One note: they sent over a blog post with what to expect from the interview, and from that I got the impression that I'd be getting more of a LeetCode-type algorithms challenge, but it ended up being more about OOP and data structures. It caught me a bit off guard, but they were right that my design wasn't great.

OOP/data structures problem in HackerRank