I applied through other source. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at WeWork (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2019
Interview
The recruiter contacted me and 2 weeks later had a call with the recruiter. After the call she said she would be checking my profile with the hiring manager. Then did not hear back for another 4 weeks. Then they emailed me saying they would like to have a technical phone round. During the phone screen the first 25 minutes the interviewer asked me by work background and the projects that I'm working on. Then I got this stupid long 'Tag validator' problem. This is not a tough program to write, but is time consuming and lengthy. It really does not test your intelligence. I did manage to write few things, but the interviewer was expecting me to have a runnable code. The interviewer seemed very un professional as I could hear her busy typing and when I was talking through what I was coding up she would not acknowledge to what I was saying. Never hinting if I was doing it the right way or not. I felt she was completely dis engaged.
Never interviewing with such a company anymore.
I applied online and was very promptly contacted by the recruiter. After the recruiter phone screen, I had a video interview with an engineer on the team I'm interviewing for. The interview was mainly technical. The turn around time after the initial technical screen was extremely fast and efficient (same day).
Then I went onsite. My location was NYC, where WeWork originated. I had 5 rounds, with a mixture of algorithms, machine learning, system design, behavioral and lunch. The interviews were well coordinated and the questions were of high quality. The questions were well-considered, balanced, and thorough. I enjoyed meeting everyone on the team. They were genuine, smart, and passionate about their work. I came out of the interview feeling very exhilarated.
The feedback and verbal offer were done in about two days; again, very fast and efficient. During the offer stage, the recruiter kept me updated constantly, and was very communicative and patient. And my would-be manager met with me to discuss the projects and initiatives in detail. I got the sense that a lot of meaningful work could be done. My would-be manager, the recruiter, and I worked together to improve my offer. In addition, my interviewers (would-be teammates) sent me very nice messages and made me feel very welcomed.
In all, this was a five-star interview experience end to end.
I applied online. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at WeWork in Apr 2019
Interview
The phone screen is pretty standard. The recruiter gave me a coderpad link, and url to join ZOOM. So a camera is needed for the phone screen.
Now comes the worst part. The guy (from Seattle office) who was supposed to interview me hopped on the call about 10 minites late. And then he started talking about he was on a meeting and blah blah blah and then gave me a brief introduction to the company. And we jumped to the coderpad coding challenge. While I was working on the problem, it seemed that he was chatting with someone. I could literally see him smiling and typing during the whole process. And the message notification kept going on his computer. I was so upset.
All I can say is that the guy was so unprofessional, and I now think I should have read the reviews before I applied. Those reviews are really helpful in terms of their culture and how they treat people. So true.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string and a list contains certain characters, find the shortest substring containing all the characters in the list.