The first interview was with the recruiter. The conversation was very positive. The questions were about cultural fit, the startup mentality, the expected payment range and stuff like that.
After that, there were two interviews scheduled. One was the coding interview and the other one was the system design. The second interview was rescheduled at least 4 times. On every reschedule, I was contacted by the recruiter who kindly apologized and asked if I’d be okay to reschedule the call, to which I agreed every time.
The coding interview was a bit of a mess. Unstructured and unorganized. The first 20-30 minutes were questions about my past experience and the things I have been working on. The interviewer was very friendly but because of so many changes in the scheduling time and the questions that were flowing, I thought it was a system design interview and not a coding interview.
After the questions ended, I was presented with a code sample and the interviewer asked me to find the bugs in the code. I managed to find them and highlighted them to the interviewer. There was a little time remaining in the call and then the interviewer asked me how I’d fix them. Since there was no input sample, nor an expected output sample, I asked the interviewer if I could use one just to speed up the things.
At the end of the interview, regardless of the ambiguity and the requirements that were unclear, I was able to fix the bugs and the code was executed correctly. We greeted each-other and the feeling was somehow positive. Given the circumstances, I felt like I did well in the interview.
On that very same day, I was again contacted by the recruiter who apologized and asked if it would be okay to reschedule the system design interview for the last time, to which I agreed but in my email, I mentioned that it would be good if there were no changes after this one.
A few hours later, I got an automated email saying they are moving on with other candidates and eventually the system design interview was cancelled.
Looking back now and seeing what a mess it was the entire process, I’m glad it was called off in time. I really liked the product and I wanted to be part of it, but I got the feeling that the company was missing something fundamental and chaos was all over the place.
