1st round 30 min get to know you interview with a team member. Then virtual onsite that lasted for 2.5 hours, meeting with 3 different people. Which consisted of Company Values, Leadership, and System Design interviews. The developer who conducted the system design was not very engaging and was mostly silent throughout the process. The people seemed passionate about their work but did not get a good vibe from the people on the team.

Short answer: Stay away from this company if you value your time. The interview process is LONG, the communication between recruiters and the engineering team is poor and they will change the rules of the game to reject you if they don't want to hire you. Long answer: The process started with a phone screening round with a recruiter. Standard questions. It was followed by a nice conversation with a Director who went over my past experiences. I was then invited to the final round consisting of two behavioral and two technical interviews. The two behavioral rounds were conversations surrounding my past experiences and responsibilities. The next round was system design where I designed Instagram. The interviewer was a very smart and seasoned engineer who was happy with my approach and told me he hopes to see me "soon". The last round was "buggy Java code review" round. This is where things started to get messy. Before the interview, I asked the recruiter about the expectation and definition of success for this round. I mentioned that I haven't worked on Java for a while and I am concerned that I might be judged on my coding style and familiarity with Java. I was told that the interview is designed to judge my "problem-solving approach" and even pseudo-code will suffice. I was also told that the interviewer will help me write the code in Java. The interview panel consisted of an engineering manager and a junior engineer. I asked the interviewers about the expectation from the round as it was difficult to understand if I just needed to identify the bad logic and coding practices, or if I also needed to fix the code and write unit tests. I fixed the obvious issues in the code within the first 10 minutes and then wrote unit tests. I also wrote code to take care of a case that was not handled already and then went over how the code structure can be improved by using classes and shared the time & space complexity of the solution. Throughout the interview, the interviewer kept interrupting my train of thought. If I would spend more than 10 seconds reading the code or analyzing a bug, he would suggest something like why don't you print something (genius!). Really AMATEURISH interviewing style! The same interviewer could not answer a very elementary question about a software architecture principle and how it applies to Mark43 architecture. It was clear that he did not like my question and I hope this did not have an impact on the feedback. I heard back a day later from the recruiter and he mentioned that Mark43 will not be extending an offer. I was told that the feedback was positive for all rounds except the buggy code review. The interviewers thought that I had a sound understanding of OOP, Data Structures, Algorithms, and Time/Space Complexity and I was able to break the problem down into small pieces, fix bugs, and write unit tests BUT my coding style was not good enough. It was also insinuated that I asked too many questions and needed "help" during the exercise (I didn't ask for help at all). This was really strange as I was told that my coding style will not be judged and the focus will be on the problem-solving approach which appears to be sound considering my understanding of advanced concepts is clear and I was able to break the problem down into small pieces and solve it. Unsurprisingly, the recruiter had no reasonable answer apart from standard robotic retorts. Advice for Candidates: STEER CLEAR. Invest your time and efforts ELSEWHERE. I took a day off from work because the recruiter said the Director really liked me and insisted on scheduling the remaining interviews within the next couple of days. He also mentioned that they already have two candidates who have done the interviews. It seems that they already had their heart set on one of the candidates and only interviewed me because the Director insisted and, thus, were looking for excuses to not hire me. Feedback for Mark43: 1- Your interview panel should be diverse. I did not meet a single POC during the entire process. You need to create a more diverse team and perhaps train your team on detecting and dealing with unconscious biases. 2- Improve your interview process. The interviewer should allow the candidate the time to figure things out while talking out loud. BE PATIENT. We had one hour and the interviewer started interrupting my train of thought just 10 minutes into the interview!! 3- The recruiters need to know what are the expectations from each round and should be able to clearly articulate them to candidates. Don't waste someone's time. It is as valuable as yours.