I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Aug 2013
Interview
Participated in 2 phone interviews. The first was with a recruiter who was very nice, and asked me a bunch of background and culture/fit related questions. This call went well so I was set up for a phone interview with the hiring manager who was also very nice and professional. In the end the position they were looking to fill wasn't a great match for my skills and we decided to not move further in the process. Overall I came away with a positive opinion of Netflix and their corporate culture though and would consider interviewing for other positions in the future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What made you leave your previous company? and of course they also asked about salary history
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA)
Interview
For the first step, I got pinged by a recruiter. When I told them I wasn't quite sure about their culture, the engineering manager wanted to directly talk to me, so I figured they had some interest. I setup the phone screen, and passed. I went to the next onsite interview which had 3 technical rounds which seemed to go ok. (One made mistakes in his responses to my comments, but I didn't say anything.)
Second onsite involved the HR, which was focused about how well I understood their culture deck, etc. Right after that, I met with the VP, who more or less took a complete 180 of their culture deck. He didn't believe in paying people what their worth (the whole baseball analogy that their culture deck pointed out). Mentioning that I was still interviewing elsewhere in case this didn't work out seemed to be a mistake, something HR and the VP brought up multiple times, although this contradicted their culture deck. He also mentioned tons of bureaucratic rules and regulations that were again, something the culture deck was trying to say made them different from companies like IBM, Apple, etc., but he more or less up front said they're the same.
I figured since I love working on projects on the side that do not compete with the business, and constantly look for outside the box solutions that working on side projects bring, it would be a good fit culturally, but I guess I was wrong.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What would one of your colleagues say is your biggest weakness?
One of the worst interviews I have ever been too. Netflix managers seems like they are like low level thugs. I would never work for such managers who comes from 3rd tier bay area companies and act like thugs. I think there are better ways to do interview. I predict a pretty gloomy future for Netflix software engineering if all the managers are same I have experienced. Not worth interviewing and wasting your time period.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing special. Just review easy to medium leet-code and review some basic design questions like load balancing etc.