I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Netflix
Interview
Got contacted by Recruiter through referral, then got setup with a phone chat with a manager of a team. Conversation with manager was good. Got the go-ahead for a phone screen.
Phone screen interviewer was awkward as he was all over the place. Asks me some questions about multithreading which I answered right. Asks me about preventing deadlocks and ends up saying I could prevent it in a certain way and he forgot that I had already mentioned that solution to him at the beginning. Small coding question on multithreading - probably 7 lines of code - which I ended up getting right with a little bit of help. There were 15mins left and he jumps to check if I had any questions for him making me wonder whether he was done asking me stuff. I start asking him questions about the team/project/challenges. Then suddenly jumps back to ask me some more technical questions regarding how I'd handle operations. Answered everything fine I thought. Ended up getting same email from them about not having the perfect background. Anyways, probably the most haphazard phone screen I've had in my career as the interviewer lacked structure. Didn't feel like the interviewer was prepared himself. Could've been an outlier in the company as I've heard great things about them.
Don't waste your time interviewing here unless you're sure you have exactly the 'perfect background' for the role.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Sep 2016
Interview
Overall it's very good, interviewers are very nice and knowledgeable. All three senior developers have different focus: one general about your background and depth of interested areas; one review the take home test; another mainly for a coding test. And hiring manager mainly asked some concepts/knowledge and some design issues. HR person focused on personality, culture, etc.
Have to say that the lunch was a little late at 2pm, and it's simple cold lunch which can be improved thinking about intensive interview day :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions are not difficult, just be calm and think clearly.
I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Jul 2016
Interview
2 phone calls prior to anything technical, 1 with recruiter another with hiring management, these calls are meant to learn about each other outside of technical skills; good to see they are doing it instead of just jumping right into some brain teasers like some other companies do.
Then 1 technical phone screen, it covered a fair amount knowledge that's relevant to the job, as well as a coding exercise via collabedit. The interviewer was kind enough to send me feedback directly afterward upon request, candid feedback is real here.
Then first onsite round, 2 technical interviewers and 2 management interviewers. I ended up stopped here due to my technical skills not meeting the need. The technical questions asked were fair given they are very frank about looking for experienced candidate, it's natural that some questions you just can't answer because you haven't deal with those problems before or haven't used a certain aspect of a language. It was pretty heavy on multi threading and cover a wide spectrum of Java programming skills.
In the end, the recruiter call me up and deliver the bummer new era in person rather than just an email, that was also nice.
Overall it was a very positive experience for me, I have less doubt about the company culture after the interview, they do care a big deal about it, which is reflected by their interview process. And their culture is obviously not for everyone.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Multi threading / concurrency / distributed computing