I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at DoorDash in Sep 2023
Interview
The first-round interview was conducted very poorly. I was told this was supposed to be a "Technical Chat", however the goals of this were never explained. It seemed to be a coding challenge where they test whether you know archaic details about a programming language and pepper you with trick questions. The interviewer was late to the interview and was arrogant throughout the process. His communication skills were extremely poor as well. The interviewer refused to answer direct questions about the problem. Despite not specifying any requirements for the problem, he complained that I didn't focus on having an optimal solution at the beginning. The interviewer was only experienced with Java/Kotlin style programming and couldn't understand the C++ I was using. This also extends to the idioms of the languages (Java frequently uses helper methods to create temporary variables and return results, C++ generally leaves this to the caller). It took three tries of him asking me what the depth of an arbitrary tree with n nodes is before he tried a question that could almost be answered (what's the best, worst and average depth?) All of this just to answer how much temporary data would be created by a recursive function with no local variables. At the end, the interviewer stated that I didn't need to know everything about my programming language, and then immediately followed that up by saying that I should've known everything about my programming language. He seemed to be unhappy that I had to look up the syntax for stringstream during the interview, even though he stated that it's ok to look up the syntax for things. Red flags from the interview: * Arrogance from the interviewer. * Poor communication skills from the interviewer. * Interviewer said he no longer works 10 hrs a day, he only works 8 or 9.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement serialization/deserialization for a tree data structure. Part 1: A binary tree Part 2: An n-ary tree I did not need to focus on the format of the serialized string or error handling.
coding online assesment virtual onsite. interviewers were professional and helpful. asked to deep dive on project. recruiter was responsive and could align with offer deadlines. was helpful with negotiations. coding problems were average difficulty.
Walking into the coding interview, I was taken aback when they asked about finding the K nearest restaurants based on coordinates. Just days before, I had stumbled on a mock on prachub.com that mirrored this question almost exactly. The interview felt straightforward, but I struggled with some behavioral questions. Overall, the experience was underwhelming; I expected more technical depth. After several rounds, they decided to go in another direction, which was disappointing given my prep efforts.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of restaurants with their coordinates and a user's location, find the K nearest restaurants
it was very easy, they ask basic programming questions, can be solved with minimal prep, however they ask a lot about why u want to work here, be prepared to talk for a long time