Interviewing manager has high ranking school, low years of experience. Seemed more interested in pointing out facts and trivia in his own interview problem than asking me questions. And I would perfectly answer the questions, but he would provide another answer that was only technically the same as mine, it just happened to be different to appear like he could one up me.
Answered the question perfectly. He then came up with a way to show that it would perform poorly (Note: It wouldn't because he doesn't really understand how software works under the hood). So his contrived example was to add a millions songs to a playlist, then and only then immediately remove them and then hit the play button. He said this would be inefficient (O(n)) but it wouldn't, because you could just use an offset of n instead of looping. He didn't understand arrays versus maps and become slightly irritated that I said something that went over his head. He also become irritated that I used recursion (which is so funny because most interviewers want you to use this) then immediately said it would stack overflow instead of asking the trade offs or alternatives such as using a stack data structure.
Here's the concerning part, the technical solution was perfect in complexity, and no call back to move forward. I strongly strongly believe the reason for not moving forward was mostly race related. Just look at the demographics for who works there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write some code to handle adding songs to a playlist
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Jelli (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2022
Interview
It saddens me that the egos of the other reviewers ruined what could have been an excellent experience for them even with no offer given.
I don't have a CS degree. I studied Chemistry so I don't have the luxury of a superiority complex. I would suggest my approach the next time and ask the interviewer his/her priority instead of assuming it is what you think it should be, such as demonstrating a recursive algorithm. I didn't get an offer but I had a pleasant experience, met some great people, and I learned something.
The recruiter was encouraging and she had a great sense of humor. She reached out to me, sent me the information I needed, and set up the interviewers. Everything else is icing.
The second interview was the best I've had in over a decade. Anyone going into an interview to argue about correctness doesn't understand why he is there. Accept the answer given and say, "Thank you."
I came up with the same answer as the interviewer who then suggested alternatives and we discussed both. There was no one-upmanship. We laughed through the whole thing. I made mistakes and he gave me an opportunity to explain my fixes. I finished by thanking him for a great time.
My computer failed to perform on the next round and I have anxiety issues around assessments it was obvious within the first half-hour that I could not think my way through the simplest of problems but the interviews progressed anyway with the sole purpose of leaving me with some nice conversations and a positive experience.
Who does that? Certainly not the people described above.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The same question with the list of songs described above. My brain froze on the next assessment question; after that, we knew I wouldn't be hired. It was a pleasant discussion.
Phone screen about what the company does and if I was interested. Setup an interview close to 3 weeks after the initial phone call. The interview was through hackerrank and over the phone. Even though hackerrank had a built in microphone and video chat, they still called me and had me use speakerphone, which was a bit annoying. The guy used to work at clearwater, so if you have ever dealt with someone from clearwater you can imagine what the interviewer was like.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a singleton service given the requirements. The requirements were to return an object or list of objects based on a key that was passed in.
