I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at QinetiQ (Waltham, MA) in Apr 2022
Interview
Kinda a comically bad interview process. First two rounds were fine. Final round was a disaster.
First red flag was that they would only interview me for an associate position, despite having two years of directly related experience (same job at a better defense company). Second red flag was that the recruiter said $100k was asking too much (I ended up in a role paying $140k).
Made me do five back-to-back 45 minute camera-on technical interviews from like 10-2. No breaks at all, so no lunch. Every interviewer went overtime so ended up being late to every interview and 30 minutes over.
First interviewer asked me about my technical experience for about 35 minutes. With 10 minutes left, he asked me to do a coding question. He read the question aloud and did not provide any examples nor a place to refer back to the question while doing the problem. The website used to actual do the code sharing was awful and would repeatedly crash and delete everything I had written.
Second interviewer clearly did no prep and was incredibly awkward. Most of the interview was led by me.
Third interview was asking me questions regarding a problem I was supposed to have written code for in an earlier interview. Turns out they scheduled the interviews in the wrong order so I was expected to answer questions about code I hadn't yet written.
Fourth interview was with the director of engineering. This was by far the best interview and actually good.
Fifth and final interview was the coding question I was supposed to have been asked first. It was basically to write pseudo code for a program that created a solved sudoku board. It was fine, but in the wrong order.
Though the interviews kinda sucked, I was more turned off by the interviewers. I interviewed for this job as a 23 year old female software engineer. I had seven interviewers during my interview process. Every single one was a white guy over 50. If you want to hire female software engineers, you need to show them that there are successful female software engineers at your company.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coder pad type problem about converting binary (only given 5 mins to complete)
Pseudo code for creating a sudoku board that correctly pre populated
Lots of experience questions
We are sorry to hear that you did not enjoy the interview process. We appreciate you providing feedback. We apologize for the interviews running over the initial time allotted and recognize that applicants take time out of their busy schedules to meet with our hiring managers. We will be reviewing our interview process for software engineers to ensure they are more efficient, timely, organized, and representative of our diverse workforce. If you would like to provide additional feedback, please reach out to feedback@us.qinetiq.com.