I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Compass in Aug 2021
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me and we had a quick chat to go over my background and Compass.
Then, I had a 1-hour technical screen with a Karat interviewer, during which I was given some general software questions (what is OOP and how does inheritance work, etc.), as well as some coding challenges. I didn't finish all of the challenges, but I was still invited to do a virtual onsite interview afterwards.
The onsite interviews were fairly standard: 1 system design, 2 technical interviews, and 1 behavioral interview with a manager, all 1 hour each (with the option to split up the interviews over 2 days). However, I could barely understand the last interviewer, and he also kept cutting me off, misinterpreted my code, and was generally unhelpful. He also only left 2 minutes for questions, since he told me just to keep working on the coding challenge. The other interviewers were easier to work with, but I learned from them that some of information I got from the recruiter was inaccurate.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an encoded string and the encoding pattern, decode the string.
I applied through university. I interviewed at Compass (Bellevue, WA)
Interview
Pretty chill. Three rounds of debugging, technical (leetcode), and behavioral, which was more like high-level with AI assistance. The values did not come up very much while going through the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had us do an AI round about forms and matching things.
Debugging, technical, then behavioral. I had been given two language options for the debugging portion (Java or Python) during the phone interview then when I went to the onsite there seemed to be a miscommunication because the interview said I could use JS since I was applying as a frontend engineer. The debugging was pretty doable, the behavioral was odd but fine.
The interview process felt chaotic and poorly organized. What I was asked in the interview didn’t align with what HR told me to expect, and the interview started late. The lack of alignment between HR and the interviewer made it feel like the company overall may be chaotic. Afterward, HR’s follow-ups were generic and robotic, and the employer also mentioned layoffs, which added to the uncertainty. Overall, it didn’t feel worth the effort.