My initial communication with the onsite recruiter was very professional and prompt. A couple of days after applying, I spent 20 minutes talking with the hiring manager in Engineering. His questions were very pragmatic, with only one them straying into algorithms I haven't used directly since my undergraduate Computer Science courses 10+ years ago. Little did I know that this was just the first of many academic exercises to be thrown at me. I then received a request to write a spreadsheet program (I'll spare the details). The exercise was timed, and wasn't too difficult. "Why", you may ask. Simple, because I wrote this program in my algorithms class in 1998, and have never used it since. The description of the program even read like it was written by a university TA. After passing that hurdle, I went to a 5.5 hour onsite interview that included lunch. In the first hour I spoke with a member of... one of the teams... I think? They just had a corporate reorg (Hi, I'm a red flag, nice to meet you) so the reporting structure was altered. I then had lunch in their breakroom with two random guys from one of the teams who really had no questions for me, or things to talk about with each other, or anything. Awkward? These guys had a 10 minute conversation with another Quantcast employee which consisted of talk about some social engagement with 10+ Quantcast employees after work. Wow, this job comes with a social life, too! Lunch & dinner are provided, so it's like you're in college again! Does anyone see a theme emerging? I then spoke with a pretty excellent developer who had some great questions that were actually applicable to most software engineering challenges. Lastly, I spoke with the manager I'd report to, followed by an incredibly arrogant engineer who I'd be working with ("He's smart, just ask him."). The engineer walked in the room, shook my hand, and then rattled off a programming question straight out of college. He asked nothing about me, why I think I'd be a good fit for the job, etc. I really don't care whether I get an offer from Quantcast. There's a definite "type" that they're looking for in Engineering: straight out of college (grad school preferred), young, single, first job. If this describes you, then you might find this a good place to start. But it's not for me.

Hiring and interview process was good. It took two weeks. There are phone initial screen and technical interview. In the technical interview, they asked the implementation of the key-value pair data structure.