Pretty typically meat market recruiter but especially apathetic engineer on the phone screen. I found the listing on LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out for a quick phone call. Pretty typical sales jargon about the company going to the moon. Then the technical phone screen. I had almost the exact same experience as the other guy who wrote about his experience from Sept '18. Found myself on a call with a standoff-ish guy. He pasted the question on HackerRank IDE and pretty much just sat in silence. I tried to get him involved by asking questions and feedback but would reply with single sentence responses. I chugged along, finishing the problem in about 35 minutes. I made a couple of syntax errors mostly from being nervous but overall didn't have any difficulty writing up an efficient solution. I asked several times if there was anything I was missing or he wanted me to expand on. Same tepid response of just "no." So I thought I was in the clear. Apparently my mistake. If you learn anything from me, make sure you don't take the lack of feedback, even when your code is working, to be a positive thing. We had 15 minutes left of the scheduled call so I asked if I could ask questions. He told me I had 5 minutes. I asked a few questions about teams and culture. He responded, un-energetically. End of call. Afterwards, I felt pretty good about it, given the code was working, we finished before the allotted time, and the interviewer had little to no push back. So I was expecting a positive outcome. I was wrong. After two business days, I get an email from a "no-reply@" email stating "we've gone with a stronger candidate." Confused, I reached out to the recruiter to thank her for her time and asked for any feedback, especially given the big gap in how I felt I'd performed. Not to my surprised, not as much as a courtesy response. Some kind of acknowledgement and appreciation for my time would be nice.

I had a couple of interview rounds with Instacart. Overall, I think it went pretty well, except for one round that didn’t feel as strong. I asked for feedback afterward, but unfortunately they didn’t share any. The system design and algorithm questions were manageable, especially if you’re familiar with LeetCode-style problems. One thing I really appreciated is that they clearly explain what to expect in each interview round ahead of time, which helps a lot with preparation.