The interview started with a two-part coding exercise online. There was one algorithm type question that was practical and had to do with airplane seating. The other part was to create a react todo app from scratch. You get three hours to complete the two exercises. I then met with the managers over a video interview. The next step was on-site, which consisted of 3 rounds. In the first round, I coded in C# on the interviewer's laptop and was expected to write unit tests for the solution. In the second round, I coded in React.js and tried to create functionality that was expected as well as the look and feel of the app. Both of these rounds felt extremely rushed. They ask questions for 20-25 mins and then leave 30 min for coding which in my opinion is not enough time to do live coding and expect much in the way of tangible results. In the first round, there was an unintentional bug in the initial code that threw me off and took up extra time because I wanted to resolve it. They leave 5 mins for questions at the end. The final round is two engineering managers. They wanted to dig deep into one of my prior projects to see how well I understood it, which parts I worked on, and the skills I learned could be applied at Alaska Airlines. We went over the allotted hour but it was a good conversation and I liked the managers. They were curious, smart, and understanding.

Tldr: coding sessions to short, mob programming is nothing like pair coding and more like your boss watching every key stroke you make, requirements were not clear and even contradictory. Phone interview with engineering manager where you talk about your experience and a short coding challenge (data structures) Timed coding challenge with 2 questions. (Simple algo, react component) On site with 3 rounds at 1hr each: Manager round where you just talk about what you've done and built very indepth. Two developer rounds "mob programming" where they will have you work on a currency converter using TDD and then a simple react front end for it. Everybody was really nice and seemed like they would be good to work with. I rated the experience as negative because of the 2 developer rounds where you have about 20-30 minutes to code by the time all their questions were done, and if you're like me, you'll rush to create a MVP then iterate once you have an idea of what you're doing. Unfortunately, the mob programming part of this makes that impossible. For example, I was just starting to code when I paused in the middle of initializing a variable to ask a requirement question when before I could ask one of the devs said "you gotta use the new keyword" which threw me off and made me forget my question because I had to explain that yes I know how to initialize a variable. Lots more like that where the mob programming was just a huge distraction. In the react portion of the Dev interview, I was told to just visually recreate the spec which I was doing. Throughout coding up the form, I was checking in to make sure I was going in the direction they wanted. When I was nearly done and time was about up I asked one last time if there's anything else I could do, one of the devs said "you didn't work on the functionality, we need to see more JavaScript". This was weird because I started out doing that stuff but was told by the other Dev not to and just do it visually.

Phone screen with software engineering manager. Asked questions about my resume and my background - soft interview. No technical questions on initial screen. I get the sense that they're very much looking for a very specific culture fit, considering they use mob programming and pair programming heavily. My impression was that computer science fundamentals are not so important here. Are you good enough to join the mob? I wasn't.