I was contacted by a recruiter via LinkedIn who arranged a call quickly. I did not know much about the company before but the call was very convincing, I got a lot of information and the recruiter was very kind. She arranged a 30-minute phone screening with an engineer which was a short discussion about my background and we covered some basic technical questions, e.g. mutable vs. immutable, memory handling in Python, how I review code, etc.
The recruiter called the other day that they are moving forward with me and I am a candidate for two teams based on my experience thus she arranged 2-2 interviews with each team.
First there was 2 consecutive video calls with NY based team in the evening (I'm based in Europe). These were 45 minutes long and hardly organized. The video was lagging, there were some connection issues (needed to reconnect a couple of times) and the interviewers were not really prepared either.
The first call included some coding in a shared HackerRank session in a language of my choice (it was Java) and some questions on my background and motivation. The interviewer looked really bored and phlegmatic, it was not a welcoming experience. The other one was very mathematics heavy which was quite uncomfortable considering my application for a software engineer role. The interviewer said she doesn't know how these interviews are arranged but she was very understandings and asked more about algorithms than statistics but I didn't get any HackerRank this time so I needed to build the algorithm up in my head and describe every step in words. It was just ridiculous.
The other day I had two onsite interviews however one of them was a video call again with a Hongkong based team member. There were many technical issues again too, he was not able to login to the HackerRank session thus he was not able to follow me coding. I needed to figure out how to login the laptop I got to their system so that I could share my screen (I was totally left alone). At some point the interviewer left the call to reconnect and I sat there for 5-10 minutes on my own until he returned, I did not have enough time to complete my code eventually. The last round was a live discussion with a local engineer mostly about my background and some simple technical questions and a brain-teaser that I solved on a white board. This round has been extended to a very casual conversation and some office tour. This engineer was very open and straightforward and he asked if I'm also interested in C++ roles too, I said no. He also said I would need to work on remote machines based in the USA that is not as fun as having your own local machine, this seemed very honest.
They promised to gave me feedback the next week but there was radio silence for two weeks. I emailed them asking about my application and the recruiter emailed me back that I have not been chosen because I said I'm not interested in working in C++.
Overall I have mixed feelings. They obviously have a poorly organized, unprofessional interview process that you can pass if you have luck. They did not make clear what I should expect on the interviews, it was also not clear that they looked for someone for a C++ role in reality.
On the other hand the recruiter was exceptionally nice (except in ignoring to give a last feedback) and the local engineer described a work place with good atmosphere and work/life balance. All in all I hope they will improve their processes in the future because it shows some incompetence at the moment.
