I initially got in contact with one of the internal recruiters at Snapchat and set up a phone call. The recruiter forgot about the phone call until I emailed them about 15 minutes after it was scheduled, at which point he called and apologized. No big deal, it happens. Talked with the recruiter, wasn't too bad, but there was a certain... arrogance in the way he spoke that was off-putting. He asked me to email him the names of all the companies I was interviewing with, as well as what stage of the interview I was in "for full disclosure". This seemed really odd and made me a bit uncomfortable, but I went ahead and disclosed it to them anyways. A Google Hangouts interview was scheduled for a few days later.
When it came time for the Google Hangouts interview, I again waited for about 15 minutes after the scheduled time before contacting them. Apparently the person who was supposed to interview me disappeared. Fine.... that's odd, but okay. Then there are some issues with Google Hangouts, but finally about 30-35 minutes after the scheduled interview we get connected. The interviewer apologized for all the delays, and then went on to describe a little about the company and his role in it.
After this, the interviewer jumps straight into the technical questions, with no mentions of my resume or any previous work I have done or anything of the sort. Again, I suppose that's fine, but it seemed odd. First up is a design question about A/B testing. I was familiar with the idea of A/B testing but I had never really used one, so I fumbled through the question a bit. There was some other question I don't remember really, and then there was a coding problem (write a sudoku verifier), which I sort of blanked on for a bit, but eventually came up with a working solution.
Here's the problem though: apparently the code editor wasn't sharing properly, but the interviewer didn't notice for over 10 minutes. There was little to no communication on his side, it seemed as if he was working on something else at the same time or completely distracted by something else (fair enough, he was pulled in last minute after the other guy didn't show up). We had to switch code editors halfway through, which was really jarring especially considering how many issues there had already been. He gave me an opportunity to ask some questions, and then the call ended. I received an email about a day later saying they had decided to not move forward with me.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that my nerves had got to me a bit, trying to get all the technical issues resolved, and so I didn't perform particularly brilliantly during the technical part. However the impression I received from the interviewer was that of dismissal, like he was just going through the motions because he had decided I wasn't good enough. That's his right to do I suppose, but it felt really disrespectful to me considering how many issues from their end I had to endure.
So to sum it up:
Pros:
* technical questions were interesting to work on
* company seems to have interesting technical problems to work on
Cons:
* recruiter forgot to call me at the time he scheduled
* recruiter asked me to reveal very specific information about other interviews I was participating in
* phone interviewer didn't show up and I had to contact them before they noticed
* interview started 30-35 minutes after it was supposed to
* practically no mention at all about my resume or past work
* interviewer didn't notice that the code editor wasn't working for over 10 minutes, made it seem as if he wasn't even paying attention to what I was working on
* overall arrogance during all stages of the process
Final thoughts: I tried really hard throughout the entire process to not let the tech community's perception of this company color my view of Snapchat, but the arrogance bled through during all stages and did nothing but affirm it. I'm sure the people who work at Snapchat are nice and do great work, but the hiring process I experienced left a very bad taste in my mouth about the company and their attitude. I really hope that my experience was just bad luck and not the usual case.
