Their feedback always comes after 1 week. The feedback for HR round, the interview with HM all came after 1 week. They ask you to submit the availability for next week, You submit your availability for a week, they always select the last hour of last day. For fun I gave them 6 days of my availability(next Mon after the week) instead of next 5 days they asked. They scheduled the interview on last hour of the 6th day.
I felt like they look at interviews trend in the whole industry and try to do everything. Normally with HM interview there is either behavioral(LP amazon style) or system design or LC. mostly combination of 2 out of 3. This was like all 3 combined. I had interviews where they ask all questions, but it always felt casual. But this was like they wanted to squeeze two 1-hour interview with two different people in to 1 hour. You can observe that every 10-15 min they see the time and move to next agenda. This was first time I felt tired after talking to HM .It is so dense. Even LC medium, LC hard in1, 60 min wouldn't get me this tired.
Then came on-site.
The first interviewer was fine. Very friendly and engaging. Thats the only good thing.
The 2nd interview was project interview. He just asked to implement a feature in project and just was there to check marks(Occasionally gave valuable input for debugging, I give credit there). I felt its waste of time totally. You are supposed to show something like input something in UI and show that it records in db within first 50 min. Which I think, I showed.
Then he asked about some questions , just reading off the list, and asked about scalability . It totally felt he was just asking because it was in the list of things to ask. Because, when I asked clarifying questions around he was visibly frustrated and asked how would that matter. I explained it matters because whether you want strong consistency or eventual consistency. I could see he was visibly mad at me and shook his head. Any way to de-escalate the situation I said, given the requirement, I assume eventual consistency would be fine because we are not dealing with financial data and moved on. He was noting down, with disgruntled face.
The next interview was huge mess. It felt like everything everywhere all at once. I didn't understand where he was going. For 45 minutes he asked me almost 6,7 different LP principles. Also felt like he was not interested in my answers. He was looking at screen and kept asking questions. He was unable to concentrate on my answers, because he was doing something personal, which I couldn't say what it is. It was very distracting to me. And it felt like I was in rapid fire round of Leadership principles.
I feel like the rainforest company in Pacific North West ruined the SE interview process. Upstart tries to copy that, but in a bad way. Or I don't how they came up with this process.
Suggestion to Upstart: I saw some companies scheduling all interviews in one day. But after 2 hours of interview, they give 1 hour break before next interview. Some companies start their interview after 5 minutes past the hour. Even then they wouldn't schedule 3 continuous hours of interview.
Also rainforest company interviewers are courteous enough and ask folks to stretch legs and have washroom break. Here your folks are on some agenda to cramp 2 hour interviews in to 1 hour. Like I said it felt like everything everywhere all at once.
I never put a review for any interview of any company, but for this I had to. Companies do mistakes I understand that, they are humans. But this is very bad experience at an organization level.
Also on whole questions are easy, but like I said earlier, they try to fit so many things in 1 hour. May be this is anecdotal. I interviewed at many places(including FAANG and top Fintech companies), but this felt very dense. May be its just me, I don't know.
