A recruiter reached out. I had a call with the recruiter, followed by a phone interview. Then, I had a 5-hour virtual onsite.

I repeatedly asked the interviewer for prep details. He sent me a list of topics to be discussed, which contained data structures, infrastructure, producers, and consumers. In the onsite, I was asked none of these things. The interview was largely behavioral, and all of the technical questions lasted for 5-10 minutes.

The interviews felt largely unstructured, as if the team didn't know what to ask. The vagueness in the questions was absolutely baffling. I was still able to solve almost all the questions and felt that I did well. I was asked literally nothing about infrastructure and ended up being quizzed on SQL, which I am pretty comfortable with.

Towards the end of the interview, the hiring manager and recruiter told me that there were other candidates in the pipeline they were considering and would let me know by next week, even though I told them that I was on a tough deadline. It seemed like they already had someone else in mind. Out of 2 roles, one got filled internally, and I was interviewing for the other. Why waste someone's time if you already have a suitable candidate for the job?

The next day, the recruiter didn't even call me and left me a voicemail saying that they decided to move on with somebody else. I reached out to him for feedback, but he didn't even respond. This was completely unprofessional with absolute disregard for someone else's time.

This process proved to be a waste of my time. The recruiter didn't know how to do his job. After meeting with this team, I was surprised to see how Zillow even has a working product, because their way of working seemed more unstructured than a school project. The manager told me that they had no deadlines, no dates, and even if someone doesn't ship out code, it's fine as the company won't go down.

I wouldn't make the same mistake of applying to this company again.

Mostly behavioral.

SQL with JOIN and CASE statements.

Asked me to code in Java. I said I knew Python. The interviewer asked me to show some syntax, like creating an array of strings and adding elements, and creating a singly linked list with O(1) insertion. I created a linked list data structure with O(n) insertion.

He asked me to change it to O(1) with almost no time remaining and then told me that I was supposed to think about DLL. The interviewer, it seemed, did not understand that DLL is a completely different data structure and we should have started with that from the very beginning if that was our objective in the first place.