I would still encourage anyone to apply to Workday, but I had a negative experience with the Workday recruiter.

First was a 30-minute screening interview with the recruiter. I let them know I was only beginning interview prep and would need a bit more time for the technical questions.

Secondly, an interview with a hiring manager. I was given reassurances this would not be technical but just based on past experience. The questions were not particularly hard (e.g., how to detect/prevent deadlocks), but it threw me off, and I didn't perform well.

I was then offered to interview for a different position. This interview, with the team manager, was just based on previous experience. I only learned during the interview that the majority of the team was based in Pleasanton and that daily standups were held at 7 PM. The tech stack was also very old compared to the job I actually applied for. 50% of their time was spent coding in their own internal programming language, which I deliberately wanted to avoid when applying. At this point, I really should have said I wasn't interested anymore.

Thirdly, there was a coding exercise to complete online by yourself within 90 minutes. The exercise consisted of finding your way through a maze, represented as a 2D array. You start top-left, and the exit is bottom-right. You can only move down and right.

Before the final interview round, I got some info from the recruiter on what to expect. The information was very general and didn't give me much to focus on. I asked if there would be any questions on system design/architecture. Their answer was there could be, and since I had a week to prepare, I might as well just cover everything.

I gave my availability for the interview and received times outside of my availability, including one interview from 8 PM to 9 PM. I should have really rescheduled, so this is on me, but it's really not a good sign to ask someone to interview at this time.

The final round of interviews consisted of 5 interviews: 4 45-minute tech interviews and 1 with the team manager's manager.

• API design challenge. Very basic. Given a dog resource and expected to know the proper request GET/POST/PUT.
• Tech leads conversation (x2). Mostly focused on talking about my background and diving into some of the technical aspects.
• Coding exercise. Given a number of ordered linked lists to merge into one ordered linked list.
• Competency/Behavioral-based interview with the manager. Questions you could expect like how you resolve conflict, what you are looking for with this job, and a time you inspired others within your team.

I was a bit surprised when I didn't receive an offer. The feedback was basically that I didn't do well enough in one interview but performed very well on the others. This was the interview scheduled from 8 PM to 9 PM. I brought this up previous to the decision, and they said yes, this wasn't good, and they would take this into account and wouldn't base the decision on this interview alone.

How to detect and prevent deadlocks?