Approached by a sourcer, I agreed to interview despite a previously bad experience with Deliveroo — which, in hindsight, was a mistake. This DoorDash interview was genuinely one of the worst I’ve had. I have no idea what training the engineer received, but if this is how they evaluate a senior engineer, they’re going to struggle.
The moment I opened HackerRank, I was met with a wall of text outlining an entire API to build — something that would take ten minutes just to read, let alone implement. The starter file was a mess: random classes thrown together with no structure and zero adherence to basic Java code quality standards.
To make it worse, the interviewer spent most of the time on his phone, texting and scrolling, completely disengaged. It was unprofessional and disrespectful.
The problem was the interview itself — poorly designed, poorly delivered, and frankly embarrassing for a company of their size. DoorDash has a lot of work to do on their SWE interview process. Hopefully the next candidate won’t be subjected to such a disorganised and unprofessional experience.