It was a 3 part process, the first being a typical behavioral/culture fit call with the company HR rep which was great. Lots of information and the work Urgently sounded interesting. The second was another behavioral/culture with the VP of engineering which also went great and got good vibes about the overall culture and direction leadership was planning to take. The third part was the technical interview with a Senior Java engineer and a Lead engineer. This is where the wheels fell off in the process for me. Both were not on camera despite a remote first company (which is fine internally if that’s your culture but for an interview?). When the first interviewer joined they weren’t very personable (no problem I can sit in silence staring at the camera). When the second joined we started immediately and they gave some mediocre introductions stating their name and the team they were on (your team name means nothing to me as an outsider give me some substance). Next they asked for an intro from me. Then I was asked an SQL question about how to select certain columns, join a table, and format the date. Then asked how to make some Java classes immutable (seems odd but figured it might lead somewhere other than general Java trivia) and the first interviewer was done with questions. The lead took over and we started the coding challenge where we had to remove duplicate LinkNodes from a sorted list. At this point I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it since I hadn’t worked on these data structures professionally and saw them in college (my bad for not prepping I guess?) but managed to provide some solution with a Set/Hashmap but they didn’t want an extra data structure. I then managed to stumble the rest of the way to the solution they wanted and spoke my thoughts as I went. After taking most of the time with the challenge I was cut off an told I can ask questions of them. Asked about culture and how the difficult the vacation policy was to utilize etc and was met with short answers or long pauses trying to think of a professional answer.
