I interviewed at Groupon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2015
Interview
They do two phone screens before inviting you onsite, and the phone screens consist only of coding problems in Coderpad (no conversation). In fact, there was no conversation with anyone in the entire process (not even a recruiter). I sensed that the engineers get stuck on phone screen duty because they both seemed disinterested from the start. There was no back-and-forth discussion at all. As I was thinking through the problems aloud, both told me that they preferred not to influence my thought process and would therefore make no comments. One of them asked me at the beginning: "Do you want to tell me about yourself?", and after I began talking I realized he wasn't really interested in the answer, so I stopped after 30 seconds to give him an escape, and he said, "OK, that's fine, here's the coding question." I greatly prefer technical interviews that emphasize the collaborative element of talking through a problem with your potential future colleagues, with whom you can debate the various ways to solve it. Groupon's process is extremely un-collaborative, and it sent me a signal that Groupon was not a good match for me. Fortunately, they are the exception, and I experienced much better phone screens and coding exercises with other companies.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a simple RegEx parser function that handles only the operators * (0 or more) and + (1 or more), and returns true if the provided string is a match. Signature: boolean isMatch(String regex, String input).
Example: regex = a*b+ce, input = bce, return true
Example: regex = a*b+ce, input = ace, return false
Example: regex = a*b+ce, input = abcee, return false
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Groupon (Prague) in Oct 2024
Interview
Interviewer late. Wouldn't proceed with interview without a camera on; cited cheating on an online test being an issue. It's a great way to kill any kind of trust dynamic within the first couple minutes - massive red flag for me and very indicative of company culture.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Groupon (Bengaluru) in Feb 2024
Interview
First round - Coding
Second round - Design
Design booking reservation system like bookmyshow
where exactly will you lock the seat for 5 minutes
concurrency issues
which database will you use for each service
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
First round - Coding
Implement LRU cache using hashmap of key and doubly linked list, how will you refactor the code
Second round - Design
Design booking reservation system like bookmyshow
Draw different services involved in online drawing tool.
Draw the diagram neatly as they will take snapshot of the diagram at end of the interview and evaluate your performance on same diagram later. No matter how well you verbally explain things, put everything in the diagram as the diagram will get evaluated later.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Groupon in Apr 2023
Interview
I was contacted by agency to join groupon as a contractor. I did first round of interview with a coding task leetcode easy and some SQL query. I was asked for a second round and after scheduled the date they just cancelled with the explanation they already found the java developer. Very unprofessional and not respectful of people time.
