Got a random email from a recruiter and decided to pursue it. The process took quite long (2+ months), but overall it was a good experience. 1) Recruiter screen - my recruiter was a great communicator and always responsive. One of the better recruiters I talked to during this job search. 2) Technical phone screen - they ask what would be considered a LeetCode easy if it were on LeetCode, but it's not really a LeetCode type problem. It's just a simple string manipulation problem. I appreciated that it is somewhat unique and not just a cookie cutter algorithm problem. One other atypical thing is that there are two interviewers on the screen as opposed to just one. 3) On-site - They focus on culture fit and technical chops about 50/50. There are only two technical interviews, one system design and one coding. The coding was quite easy, just cookie cutter Leetcode easy problems. I easily finished two optimally in the time allotted. The system design one was a bit harder to read, my interviewers were not very chatty and I just went along with my design without them asking too many questions. I think I did well but It's hard to say if I was doing what they expected me to do. The non-technical interviews were a bit atypical for engineering interviews I would say, they were only thirty minutes each and very generic job interview type questions rather than specific to engineering. One thing I should mention is that every interview had at least two interviewers (I've never seen this before), which I guess was fine if not a little distracting. Another thing I noticed is that the engineering team I talked to was quite diverse - a black engineer, and hispanic engineer, and more than one woman engineer. That was a bit refreshing and not what I am used to. Overall I had a good experience and I thought I did quite well in the interviews, but ultimately I was not given an offer. The NYT seems like a great place to work and I was really bummed they didn't make an offer (and I don't really know where I messed up, they did not provide detailed feedback).

I don't know why I keep applying to this company. This was the third time I've applied over several years to various departments, and each time I canceled the interview process due to bad experiences or better job offers. This particular interview was similar to my prior interviews, but this one was especially poorly organized. I had an hour and a half discussion that was broken up into two parts: hiring manager, Staff Engineer & a junior engineer (shadowing), and then the HM left the meeting during the technical part. The HM asked an open ended question about how I would work on a feature. For whatever reason, there was confusion by one of them in regards to my answers and I was interrupted several times to be asked questions I already answered. It was difficult to move forward in the discussion. For the technical part, the coderpad environment was not properly setup, so I was not able to do the problem in my preferred (allowed) language (the language this job works in a large part of the time). They offered almost no help, so I resorted to writing out the problem partly in pseudocode just to complete the task. After the interview, I reached out to the recruiter and told them I'm not interested, so this is definitely the last time I'm applying. As much as I enjoy reading the NYT, the pay is really low and interview process is joyless.