This is a startup building autonomous excavators. I felt like I wasn't really a match for it, but a recruiter reached out, and since the job market is rough right now, I figured I'd use it as practice. The role is senior, and they have an office in Bellevue.
I first got a hardware guy who spent a while asking why I was considering their company and stuff like that. I told him there wasn't really a specific reason — I was just looking around recently and their recruiter happened to reach out to me, that's all.
Then came the algorithm question. The problem was phrased in a really roundabout way, and I spent a lot of time just trying to understand what it was actually asking. Eventually I realized it was a merge intervals problem. I wrote the algorithm and verified it with a simple example. Then I noticed there were two follow-up questions left, so I rushed to look at them. The first one wasn't a big deal, so I moved on to the second one — but it turned out to have nothing to do with the original problem at all, basically a brand new question. It took me a long time just to understand it, and by then I didn't have much time left to code, so I just talked through my approach out loud. The approach should have been fine, but the interviewer still failed me anyway.
The interview wasn't fun at all. This company's questions are needlessly convoluted, and the interviewer's own resume was pretty mediocre too. Didn't really get much useful practice out of it.
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