First a phone chat, then a screen, then a 6-hour take-home assignment, then a 5-interview onsite panel of mostly whiteboard statistics and algorithms exercises. The former 3 were fine, the onsite was unpleasant. I was not given an offer, but I would not have gone to Lyft had I been given one, anyway. A few of the people I met at Lyft seemed really great. But the rest, not so much. I was interviewed by one of the most abrasive and unpleasant people I've met in a long time. Thinking back, the degree to which he challenged everything I said, often with incorrect views of his own or nonsensical objections (e.g. challenging my dislike of the Uber "image" as compared to Lyft), was mind-boggling -- I can't imagine what it would be like to work with this guy. My overall feeling of the interviews was that there was a "right answer" to nearly every question, and they did not have any room to entertain even perfectly-viable alternatives. In addition, they were looking for people who would fit right in to a specific role from day 1: more of a big-company approach than a small-company one.

I interviewed with a recruiter last fall. Since I was graduating in eight months, she said she'd talk to the hiring manager about whether to send technical interviews now or hold off for different openings in the future, and would get back to me in a few days. She never followed up and didn't respond to my emails. Eventually, I got an automated rejection, the subject line literally read "Update on [insert job title]," they hadn't even bothered to fill in the job title. The whole process felt unprofessional.