Position: Senior Software Engineer, Core Product. The onsite was in San Francisco and was originally scheduled for 3 hours.
Round 1: Live coding (1 hour)
Practical coding, not LeetCode. It was a duplicate-files type of question: given a set of filesystem helpers, deduplicate files by their contents. The follow-ups kept digging into I/O and read optimizations.
Round 2: System design (1 hour)
A question closely related to their business: designing a dialing-campaign scheduling system.
I got stuck in this round. The experience was terrible: the interviewer gave almost no hints the entire time and just sat there playing on his phone, with zero interaction. When I got stuck, he watched; when I spoke, he replied "Mm-hmm." After an hour, it felt like I'd been solving the problem for empty air.
Round 3: The manager round was canceled at the last minute
The next round was supposed to be a conversation with the VP of Engineering, who would have been my manager. After the second round, HR came over and said the manager had become unavailable, so this round wouldn't happen.
Honestly, by then I didn't want to keep interviewing either. After the second-round experience, talking more would just waste everyone's time. But this was still a pretty low move: canceling the final onsite round on the spot. It felt like, "Your time isn't valuable; mine is." Even telling me a day ahead would have been fine. What kind of move is canceling it on the spot?
Outcome
I received a rejection email the next day. The process ended at the onsite.
Discussion
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