4 ms·
> I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview. L
by foofie 3y ago
> I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview.
Last year I interviewed for MongoDB. They proudly boasted that their hiring process consisted of a 7 interview marathon. I asked if that wasn't too many interviews, and the interviewer boasted that they already managed to streamline their process down from 12 interviews.
They also proceeded to point out that all FANGs follow the same process, except they really don't.
I respectfully dropped from the hiring process there and then. The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality is out of this world.
- ohthatsnotright 3y ago> The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality is out of this world. Nah, just "webscale" like everything else Mongo.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoHa, I had a phone interview with MDB for a (contract!) technical writing gig, and they told me the next steps include (1) a one-hour critical thinking test, whatever that means, and (2) a one-hour writing interview. Not a take-home writing assignment, which would be pretty standard, but a live writing interview via Zoom screen share. Very unusual, but I don't have too many other things on the horizon right now, so I'll see where it goes...
- smcin 3y agoDoing the writing assignment live and on-screen is simply to verify you didn't cheat/impersonate/get help/use AI/plagiarize.
- testless 3y agoContract implies they hire a service, thus should not care how it was created, right?
- smcin 3y agoa) Outright cheating in the interview is probably a bad sign about the candidate (whereas the interviewers might be ok with, say, using GenAI, which is increasingly common in many sectors). But impersonating a candidate, or having a friend sit in with you, would always be a bad sign. b) Not necessarily, some companies would care if their contract writer stole/copied/repurposed/reused content from a competitor/regurgitated copyrighted material. Think also GenAI hallucinations, fabricated citations, etc. But sure, most cost-conscious companies won't give a hoot, so they could probably get by with cutting corners.
- klardotsh 3y agoI interviewed for a Sr Software Engineer gig there in 2022 and had a laughably negative live-leetcode experience where the interviewer was visibly zoned out almost the entire time and mostly just awkwardly stared at the camera while I found a solution - whether or not the most optimal, I guess - to whatever pointless never-going-to-actually-write-stuff-like-this-on-the-job thing they'd asked me. I asked for feedback on the blurb or ways to improve it and got told, basically, "well you took so long" (~30 minutes?) "to implement this that we don't really have time for that", or something to that rough effect. I got a relatively generic rejection email shortly thereafter, and frankly, only minded because I was unemployed at the time. I have no idea what whoever designed their hiring process thinks they're getting out of being overcomplex and generally cold, but I can't imagine it's anything good.
- pcollins123 3y agoSeems like it worked for them.
- klardotsh 3y agoYep, attracting a reputation as a shop with a joke of an interview process seems like a good achievement to strive for...
- rvba 3y agoWell, after their interviewing process they end up with things like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16833100/why-does-the-mongodb-java-driver-use-a-random-number-generator-in-a-conditional https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16833100/why-does-the-mo...