Some details have been intentionally obscured.
HR reached out on LinkedIn. I ignored the first message, but then they messaged once a week for the next two weeks. I wasn't doing much, so I thought I might as well interview and see.
At the end of July, I took the OA for position one and received a phone-screen invitation the next day.
One question involved a drone delivering packages clockwise around a loop. I was given the travel time between each pair of neighboring points and had to find the time to finish all deliveries along the route. I had seen the original question on Xiaohongshu and used prefix sums. The second question was AI coding, though the AI wasn't very useful. I was given a whole project to debug; reading the function definitions in the README was enough to make the fixes.
After two weeks, in early August, I still hadn't heard anything. I asked HR and was told the position had been filled.
HR gave me three other positions to choose from. I picked a Seattle team, and they scheduled a phone screen that day.
A week later, I had the phone screen for position two. The SDE interviewer was nice and kept giving hints. There were thirty minutes of behavioral questions and thirty minutes of coding. She asked about missing a deadline, a project I had started on my own initiative, and a project with a large impact, all with follow-ups. It felt as though she was mainly collecting information. She had written the coding question herself: an annual vehicle-inspection registration problem with registration required every six months. Registration was closed on holidays and open only from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Each slot lasted an hour, and each registration used one slot. Given n vehicles waiting to register, distribute their registrations as evenly as possible. I was at a loss, so I kept talking with her and improvised two functions, one for slots and one for scheduling. The follow-up changed the daily registration hours to 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
I thought I had failed the phone screen, but the next day I received a virtual-onsite availability survey that had to be submitted within 24 hours. I submitted it as soon as I got it. The date was confirmed that day for two weeks later.
They didn't send the detailed virtual-onsite schedule until the day before the interview.
I checked LinkedIn. The hiring manager had just transferred teams, and the senior interviewer had moved from PM to SDE. I couldn't find profiles for the other two interviewers.
What else was there to say? I'd interview. What could I do?
The first virtual-onsite round was with the hiring manager. He asked about the AI-agent project on my resume: how I had built it, how many people used it, and which company departments I had worked with. He asked about my biggest mistake, whether I had proactively improved company processes, conflicts with others, and how I handled criticism. Up through the behavioral questions, it felt okay. The coding was simple: exactly Meeting Rooms, LeetCode 252. I first explained a two-pointer approach, adding 1 at a start and subtracting 1 at an end. But I blanked and forgot that I needed to return the maximum. He asked, "Won't this become zero?" I said I'd take another look, but thought my approach should be right. I was quiet for a moment, then said I should return the maximum during the scan. I dry-ran two test cases. He didn't say anything, so I wrote the code and explained the complexity. Suddenly, he said I definitely had multiple screens. I was stunned and said, "No, I can show you my room." He just smiled and said time was up.
What on earth???
The second interviewer asked unusual behavioral questions: whether I had learned something new and how I had applied it at work, what I had done on the project that brought the company the greatest benefit, and what I had done for a customer that made them very satisfied. There were no follow-ups. We went straight to system design: design a microservice to receive notifications, handling sudden bursts of data with low latency. Whenever I asked him something, he said it was up to me. By the time I finished the diagram, time was up.
Wait, what????
I canceled the interviews scheduled for the next day. I didn't want to continue. This was ridiculous. What was that supposed to mean, that pausing to think was cheating? Unbelievable. They seemed very hard to get along with. Even if I joined, I'd only be making myself miserable.
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