Just finished interviewing this week. Not a great experience. The whole process was rocky — I got switched between teams for matching several times, and there were two months between the phone screen and the onsite. Security & Service org. It felt like they wanted to go through the motions without actually wanting to hire me. The third round with the HM in particular was a really bad experience, I've never felt that way in an interview before.
L6 is 5 rounds, one hour each. You don't know ahead of time which round is which (BQ or system design) — the recruiter won't tell you. The second day was 3 hours back to back, the recruiter didn't schedule any breaks, and when I asked about it, I was just ignored.
Round 1 — Coding (OOD? Problem Solving?)
Interviewer was a manager from a neighboring team with many years of tenure, plus 2 BQ questions.
The coding question was to write, in code, a price calculator for something like Uber/Lyft, but it had to maximize the company's gain while also guaranteeing fairness. I was pretty confused at the time, had no idea what he actually wanted, asked some clarifying questions and got almost no answers back — just "this is your code, you make the assumptions." So I treated it like an OOD problem and made my own assumptions. Partway through writing it, he cut me off and said my assumption was wrong, then started piling on requirements — like how the price should be calculated if someone wants to carpool, and so on. By the end he seemed pretty unsatisfied and told me what he'd expected: that my code should have started with a pricing strategy framework, then after a user request it should return routes for the user to choose from, then calculate price based on the route and other factors, etc. Listening to all that, it basically sounded like a system design problem that he wanted written as code. Anyway, I was completely lost the whole time, had no idea what he was going for.
Round 2 (coding)
This interviewer was an L7. This round was a good experience — a proper question, professional conversation, communication was smooth. The question: given a user access log, parse it to find which users are repeat visitors (visited on different days).
Round 3 (coding)
The HM interviewed this round. This one was really bad. He seemed completely unprepared — kept stammering, looking around the room, and kept interrupting me during the BQ portion, and not politely either. The key detail: right in front of me he pulled out a big pack of gum and started chewing. I froze for about 3 seconds. Over the course of the whole interview he chewed through 3 pieces, talking while chewing. About halfway through I remember thinking that even if this team's manager offered me the job, I wouldn't really want to take it. The coding part was also OOD-flavored — something like top-k products, but events come in as a stream and your method has to return the real-time top-k. I finished it and walked through the complexity too; he said he had more to ask but ran out of time.
Round 4 (bar raiser, pure BQ)
Bar raiser from a different team, a fairly senior manager. He seemed pretty normal, and the conversation went fine.
Round 5 (system design)
Interviewer from a neighboring team. The BQ and system design exchange was decent. The design prompt was to design a risk management system — really a ticketing system where users can create and modify tickets, and a risk-scanner bot can also submit tickets, and users can pull a monthly report. It felt like it went pretty smoothly — I mostly drove the conversation myself, and whatever points the interviewer raised, I addressed quickly.
Two days later I got a call from the recruiter saying I didn't get it, and they couldn't give specific feedback — just that it was mainly the coding (round 1, I'm guessing?) and some leadership principle. Honestly I felt nothing about it, because the experience was so bad I had zero desire to actually work there anyway, so getting rejected was fine by me too.
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