I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Crunchbase (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2022
Interview
Short phone screen, then a technical interview with two engineers. The recruiter mentioned the technical should be done in either Java or Scala. The engineers offered several other languages to choose from however.
Had a pretty normal phone screen, pretty much exactly what you would expect. Then, for the second round technical screen, I was called up with absolutely no advance warning, no confirmation, no calendar invite. I went along with the interview because I wasn't sure if the interview date had slipped my mind (it hadn't). Given the fact that I 100% would have rescheduled had I known about it in advance it seemed like a sick joke when I got the classic "we will not be moving forward" email a week later. I mean honestly though, did I really even want to move forward with them?
I applied online. I interviewed at Crunchbase (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2017
Interview
tl;dr they cut me off on the onsite after 2 rounds for some arbitrary reason. Regardless of how you look at it, it's just straight up disrespectful.
Applied online, got a callback from a recruiter, was sent a Hackerrank. I completed the Hackerrank, was contacted again to have a call with an engineer. After the call (mostly cultural), I was contacted again to schedule an onsite, which I did.
During the onsite interview, I was supposed to be going through 5 -6 rounds of interviews. What ended up happening was that I got asked to leave after 2 rounds, as I did not meet the technical bar (I was not given any question where it is was possible to do so poorly to merit such a response. I had at least rudimentary solutions for all problems I was given, which means I was near some semblance of a minimum bar). This felt completely disrespectful for 2 reasons:
- It established that they were looking for someone who can vomit out perfect algorithms all day. Not all candidates are perfect; everyone has flaws. What matters the most is the willingness and the ability to work through these flaws and weaknesses.
- It established that they didn't care about the cultural aspects of the interview. They didn't care about my experiences as an engineer, the hardships I encountered, etc. All that mattered was that I wasn't perfect.
Or maybe they kicked me out because someone accepted the position as I was interviewing, which implies poor internal communication. Either way, the way I was treated at the onsite was just straight up disrespectful. The least they could do is to just go through with the onsite process, turn me down, and then provide feedback on my strengths/weaknesses/etc. When I probed for feedback, I got a generic response, and when I tried to probe for more fleshed out, actionable feedback, I'm pretty sure I got ghosted.