Each interview followed a similar pattern: discuss your work, tell me about [software engineering topic] and your experience with it, now let’s do a coding problem. Sometimes I did a problem quickly and they made the problem more complicated, or gave me a completely separate one. I was not asked riddle-type questions. I was not asked dumb, typical HR-type questions (“What’s your biggest weakness?”). Between every interview they will talk to each other and they will send e-mails to the other people in the interview loop. Yes, they’re talking about you behind your back. And yes, they will tailor future questions to cover areas missed by previous interviewers, or to follow up on a weakness. Also, not every interviewer is on the team you’re interviewing for. I liked this because it gave me an opportunity to learn more about other groups. In the first interview, the coding problem was to generate a well-known data set. I first considered how to generate the nth iteration of the dataset, but she quickly steered me to solving iterations 1-n (which is much easier). I went over the algorithm in my head and out loud, before writing any code. Then I wrote the simplest, naive code that I could think of. I immediately saw some inefficiencies and worked to address them. She prodded me slightly to the answer she was looking for (I would have gotten there).