First off, this interview took almost an entire day.
Google, Amazon and Facebook all reimburse you for your time. For one of my interviews with them, I was reimbursed $1,200 on-the-spot.
Localytics had zero consideration for my time, and thought it was rude of me to even ask. No, Localytics, it's super rude for you to expect me to take a day off from work, and value as time at $0/hr. This isn't an intern-level job.
To top that off, they don't have parking, and don't reimburse for parking. So not only did I lose out on making money that day, I ended up spending $40 for the priviledge to not make money. Off to a great start.
Got to the building. No one was waiting there, ok. Talk to building receptionist, she tells me to take the elevator up to their floor. Get there, all doors are locked, no intercom, no phone service. Takes 15 minutes before I can get a stranger to go find someone for me. As I'm finally greeted and escorted in, they "joke" about me being late.
I get shuffled around from room to room for the next 30 minutes or so. They forgot which room they booked. Oh, no, they forgot to book a room. Oh, this one is taken. Then, they scramble to find someone to do the interview. They didn't plan anything ahead of time.
They have me take a coding challenge. No, I can't do it on my computer, I have to use theirs. Ok. Their computer starts throwing errors in the terminal. Interviewer says "weird, I can't replicate that on my machine" -- an almost comical response, if it wasn't in this context.
During the code challenge, she kept on asking if I needed help, and giving advice and pointers. Which is super nice and helpful -- but, I'm in the middle of trying to show what I can do; I didn't want my effort to be discredited. Found out later that this was perceived as me not "respecting female developers opinions", and made her feel "uncomfortable".
Stage two. Different interviewer. Whiteboarding exercises. Run through most of them just fine. Try to be a little more personable, throw in a few jokes -- but this guy doesn't joke. He didn't get the whole concept of what humor is. You could *feel* the awkwardness in the air.
Halfway through, the challenges switch up to an open-ended hypothetical. It wasn't directly related to front-end development. I interpret it as a design-related concept, and proceed from there. It was actually about back-end development, and I failed to read his mind properly. He's visibly offended now.
The conversation turns towards back-end development. Not what I was applying for, not what I prepared for, and not really my thing. He goes deeper into it, really drilling down hard into server-side authentication techniques. I joke about getting back on topic. I forgot he doesn't understand jokes. He's super offended.
Next round is "lunch" -- supposed to be a time to "chill" with my future co-workers. I was given a choice of a turkey sandwich, roast beef sandwich, italian sandwich, or meatball sandwich. I'm vegan, and I've got no great way out of this.
This round continues, regardless of actually eating. I'm starving. These two "co-workers" are starving, and they make sure I know it. Conversation was awkward. Mostly the two of them trying to out-hipster each other on knowledge of whatever tech topics were trending on Reddit that week.
Next stage was pair-programming. Kick-off the conversation by trying to be jovial and social. I don't care about basketball, or really know anything about it. That was the only topic my pair-programmer here wanted to talk about.
Then he starts sniffling, coughing, and sneezing. I'm watching his nose start to leak, as he wipes it with his hand, and goes back to typing and clicking. Then he hands me the keyboard. Ohgodnopleaseno. So far, this is the only person who hasn't been offended by me somehow -- so I risk it and get to work. (I ended up catching that cold.)
Would have been a decent exercise, if it was pair programming, but it wasn't. It was more like an exercise to see how well I could follow his directions, as he tried to walk me through what to do, step-by-step. This is the second time I'm being asked to code, but at the same time, treated like I have no what I'm doing. The challenge was stupidly easy, solved in a few lines of code, which I did as fast as possible to minimize exposure to the now-sticky-with-snot-residue keyboard.
Unfortunately for me, the way I did it, was not the way this guy wanted me to do it. Even more unfortunately for me, he didn't know it was possible to do it the way I did it. This was supposed to be a "senior" developer, who kicked off this exercise with a holier-than-thou attitude. He wasn't humbled, though. Just offended.
