Applied online through their university recruiting site. I was sent a coding challenge where I had a week to finish it once I opened the test, but they wanted you to finish in around 90 minutes. There were 3 questions - 1 SQL, 1 Dynamic Programming, and another general CS question. I completed in about 2 hours and I didn't hear back.
I applied online through the twitters job site. Recruiter reached out to me and we had a fantastic conversation. We set up a technical phone interview for couple of days later.
This is where things started to get bad. First of all, interviewer had a very cocky and unimpressed attitude. When talking about one of my projects he had a lot of condescending questions. Secondly, he refused to indicate what solution he wanted to get out of the questions he asked. You know how they say "Interviewers want you to succeed."? That certainly did not feel true going through this call. And thirdly, please don't use speaker phone and sit meters away from it. An interview isn't going well when I have to keep asking you to repeat your question.
I am glad however that I had this experience. It's always nice to weed out potential team members who you know you wouldn't get along with (I am sure in his own way he felt the same). I like teammates who are smart yet stay humble.
Don't be condescending to your candidates. You are coming in with all the context and existing knowledge possible to your interview question. The candidate does not have that luxury.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a function that returns a random element from a list. What happens when there's another thread writing to this list and you want to make get_random threadsafe?
In a single day I got email from 2 recruiters from different teams.Started the process with one of the team ( As twitter has a policy that you cannot interview with 2 teams at the same time).Initial phone screen with the recruiter and then she told me a coding exercise will be sent to you which should take around 3 hours to complete. I completed the challenge in perfect time and optimized the code a lot and solved the problem completely. I was pretty sure I will make it to the next round, but after 2-3 days the recruiter sent me an email that she didnt not receive a positive feedback from the team.I was really shocked and asked for some feedback.
Recruiter was really good as she took some time to provide me feedback(which no company does).She told me review was " Problem was solved completely and outputs were correct" but the person does not have OOPS skills and knowledge.I was shocked to read this as no where in the problem was specified that I have to use OOPS concepts and had freedom to code in any language(I choose python) . I am not sure how can you judge a person on OOPS skills even when I didn't even use OOPS concepts in my code. I could have easily coded that In JAVA if they wanted me to judge on that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding exercise of a feature that Twitter already has in production.