I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Auction.com (San Mateo, CA)
Interview
Phone screen and onsite. Solved algorithms on whiteboard. Rejected because I didn't use Java when solving the problems. I never use Java for whiteboard questions as its too verbose for a time constrained task.
The interview process was long and archaic. The entire process was for 5+ weeks with just 3 rounds(60 min + 60min + 30min) scheduled separately. To know the interview decision, I had to email 3 different people over 1.5 weeks when I was promised the feedback in 2 days.
The actual technical round was 1 hour long with questions mostly on background and a small coding problem at the end.
And then came the interview with the CTO. I've always felt that any company that has a CTO or VP round at the end of the hiring process is not a tech-heavy company. Clearly, this company too followed this old-fashioned way of hiring that is fit for hiring non-tech and also speaks for the scale of work at the company as every engineer needs to get through the CTO round to get hired. This round was fairly usual where the CTO has not done any background prep on the candidate and their performance in previous rounds and just tries to fit the candidate into their perception of an ideal candidate.
This company is not serious about hiring people for the role because they are very laid back in their tech and process. I was told that they are always looking for a really good fit and they take one person through the entire interview loop and then simply hand out a rejection at their own pace. The interview process was definitely sub-par even for a non tech company.
Avoid interviewing here if you care about your tech career.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you keep yourself updated on new tech? Somehow the interviewer kept drilling into this question for no good reason.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Auction.com (Los Angeles, CA) in June 2021
Interview
Extremely professional HR. Everything else is average. Decent company. Smart people.
It seems that they have an insufficient number of developers currently.
Lots of stages. The process was quite long. Several weeks at least.