Earlier stages were well-organized and recruiter communication was fine. The technical round was disappointing. The interviewer was visibly working on a second screen for much of the session and clearly wasn't following the conversation - at one point he asked me a question I had already answered a few minutes earlier, as if he hadn't heard the first response. Follow-ups repeatedly circled back to points I'd already addressed. For a principal-level loop I expected a rigorous, two-way technical discussion. It's hard to get a fair evaluation when the interviewer isn't actually present for it.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Design ServiceTitan's real-time dispatch and scheduling system — match jobs to technicians by skill/location/availability, prevent double-booking, and push live updates to the dispatch board and mobile app.
Design a vehicle-tracking system: ingest location data from many third-party hardware devices installed across a fleet, track and store vehicle movement in real time, and expose it for live and historical viewing
Had screening done. Experience was good while interacting with the recruiter. She Accessed my experience and had asked questions related to tech skills they required for the role. It seems off to my experience level but got Idea about their role requirement. Looking for the technical help from glassdoor
I applied online. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at ServiceTitan in Jan 2024
Interview
Upon joining the meeting, I met with a friendly staff engineer. He asked me for an overview of my background and then immediately jumped into a HackerRank live coding exercise.
The coding exercise itself, like many already mention here, is to implement a MultiMap data structure, along with some extension methods. I felt I did well until I got to the intersect method. In my opinion, this coding exercise is flawed because 1) the requirements are unclear; the provided visual diagram describes intersect differently than they expect you to implement it. 2) the interface to the MultiMap class they ask you to implement makes it very unintuitive to use in an extension method.
Because I tripped up on one extension method, I was not given an offer, despite having performed well the first hour or so of the interview. They didn't even bother getting to know me or ask about my experience, really. In the future, I am going to start declining interviews at companies that do these leet code / hacker rank challenges. They prove absolutely nothing about what I can do as an engineer, especially in a Principal role. It's no wonder that they have many negative reviews by people currently working there.