Quick summary: Round 1: LeetCode 300 + resume questions. Round 2: LeetCode 403 + resume questions. Round 3: resume only.
TL;DR: all high-frequency questions, grind them, and talk through your resume well.
If you don't want to read the rant, feel free to skip out now — what follows is my personal venting, and I need to get it off my chest.
The first two rounds felt like they were with people actually on the team, and they'd clearly had some real work experience, so the conversations were pleasant and I'm grateful we both learned something from each other. But the third round, the HM interview, disgusted me and still does. After the interview I really regretted not pushing back in the moment...
This HM seemed like an "experienced" manager who'd either relocated from the China office or is currently based there managing two teams at once. The entire interview was full of internet buzzwords, or maybe just internal ByteDance jargon — communication was really not smooth overall. And this HM really doesn't like communicating in English. A few times I unconsciously switched to English mid-sentence and got cut off immediately, before I could even finish one sentence in English.
After some standard textbook questions, the HM moved on to my resume. He picked four projects to ask about, and after I finished explaining each one he'd throw in a line like "this project performed really poorly" (his exact words), "we wouldn't do it this way" ... and so on. Whenever I tried to explain some of the harder parts of a project so he'd understand it more deeply, he'd cut me off. My impression was that this was basically a stress test — the HM didn't actually care about the details, he just wanted to put down my work experience.
I'm honestly a pretty passive person by nature so I didn't push back in the moment. If any of you run into an HM like this, please just tell them off on the spot, don't hold it in — otherwise you'll just feel disgusted every time you think back on it, like I do.
One more complaint, about the recruiter: before the interviews, any question I asked got an instant reply. After the HM round (which I'm guessing I failed), total radio silence. The least you could do is send me a rejection email. I've applied to thirty or forty companies this job search and I've collected plenty of rejection letters — why can't you all just end things with a little basic decency?
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