I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at CarGurus (Cambridge, MA) in Apr 2018
Interview
I was passive on this opportunity and i felt compelled to entertain the idea of seeing what they were working on and what they had to offer. Started out with a technical phone screen which was fine as most of the questions probed my understanding of debugging an application end to end and optimizing the given app. Was provided with an interview loop schedule with 1hr per session with technical managers. Upon arrival i knew things did not get off on a professional note as it took a few mins to get settled and brought to a room. First interviewer was fine with coding questions and database questions but seemed like 1hr was way too long as i felt compelled to keep asking questions about the work environment to kill time. Realized that they use super old tech (struts) and seemed to be trying to do what many other companies are doing these days which is turn a monolith to microservices. Its safe to say at this point my interest level had declined. Next interviewer wanted to explore a design problem but was not very specific on the question only that when probing for more details it seemed he was irritated and wanted to move on. I felt i manage to give viable solutions to all their questions and part of problem solving is the discovery process not having memorized an answer to a problem. At some point i was left in the room for about 15 mins to play with myself until i was told other folks were busy at an all-hands meeting. Shocking to know that i took a day off from work to be sent home after seeing 2 interviewers. I did not appreciate that my time was not appreciated and it seems that code monkeys are better suited to work at this place. Overall, good to know that the grass is not always greener on the other side.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at CarGurus
Interview
I was approached by the CarGurus sourcer on LinkedIn and then introduced to a recruiter. Initial phone call went well. Had a phone screen with one of the engineers on the team. Cleared it as the questions were very easy and was asked for availability for onsite. They have 2 virtual rounds and 2 in person rounds. For the 2 virtual rounds one of the interviewers wasn’t prepared well. She had some weird question and when asked for clarification she kept blabbering about the use case instead of the intrinsic details of the problem. For the in person onsite they asked me for the availability and after confirming I couldn’t attend due to health reason and respectfully asked to postpone the date. I was given a new date but this time again postponed due to a team member not being available. When I asked for new date, I didn’t hear back from them for a week and later received a rejection email. Very unprofessional behavior I must say.
Typical screening call with a recruiter followed by a one hour technical interview. During the technical interview neither interviewees turned their camera on which was rather disrespectful. The technical questions weren’t difficult but when I would try to further clarify my answer I would get cut off and rushed to the next question. Overall a strange experience and will not be moving forward with this company.
Interview contained 2 parts: - live coding: simple SQL tasks, 1 task from leetcode and 1 open task for tree knowledge - something like system design interview. Interviewer described me a problem and I suggested different approaches, but each time I tried to propose any other option, he kept asking only about caching approach. Didn't like that part to be honest. At the end there were also general questions like "describe yours hardest task".
