Fairly standard interview process for these types of companies. An initial screening, followed by two rounds of phone interviews, and finally an on-site interview. The on-site interview had to be swapped for a virtual interview due to COVID-19.
PROS:
- The coding portions of the interview were all relevant to the job. They were not just toy examples.
- The turnaround time after each interview was extremely quick
- Most people were easy to talk to, which made each interview feel relatively quick
- You set your own pace for the interview rounds. Some of my rounds were over a month apart.
- The recruiters ask for your feedback to them after each round
- The interviews were actually easier than I thought they'd be, except the last round I wasn't given as much guidance on what to study as the first two rounds, so I spent time on useless info.
CONS:
- The interview questions were more like a shotgun blast across a wide range of topics rather than focusing on anything in particular. It went from as low level as how/when shared libraries are loaded when starting an application to as high-level as designing video streaming service.
- Before the final round, you are handed off to a different recruiter
- Based on browsing this site, they seem to use the same questions for each candidate. It makes me feel like they are just a cog in the wheel with no real input to the process. With nothing being tailored to the candidate, it feels like they don't actually care about your strengths and weaknesses outside of their own perceptions.
- The interviewers do not look at your own LinkedIn profile or resume until they are in the process of interviewing you. Therefore their questions against your background are either stock or ad-lib. There is little to suggest most interviewers care about your history or interests.
- They count on their name a little too much to persuade you that its worth taking a hit to your salary and/or quality of living. Especially if you are relocating from a more affordable area. The benefits are not substantially different from my current employer.
- Some disconnect between recruiters and interviewers, which is pretty common. For example, I repeatedly said this would be a change in both domain and roles for me, and I wasn't sure I'd be a good fit, even though I was interested and more than willing to learn. I do have extensive experience other tech domains. I was assured that there would be an extensive training process for the role, and the experience, while important, didn't matter quite as much as the ability and interest to learn the job. The feedback I received after the final interview indicated that experience was in fact one reason I didn't get the job; they wanted someone who could hit the ground running, even though the position was being held open indefinitely and there would be a training period after hire.
- Feedback was almost non-existent after the last interview. Whereas I talked directly with the recruiter after every other round, the last round feedback was left as a voicemail. They did not solicit my feedback.
TIP: Go through the second Google SRE book, the workbook.