First screen was just a chat with the hiring manager about the role, expectations, and making sure I wasn’t a crazy person - was a very pleasant chat. Then we’ve setup a proper 45 minute tech screen:
Interviewer and I enter the zoom chat at the same time, no chitchat, they wanted to dive right in as there are many parts - one weird thing, we were using coderpad because I wasn’t able to use my IDE, and the interviewer said they needed to see my mouse… so we share-screened my coderpad…. But I’m pretty sure coderpad let’s you see the cursor. Anyway, odd requirement, moving on.
They immediately paste a wall of text, and sat quietly, I was taken aback, and asked if I should just read through, to which they nodded. So reading through the interview question, it was essentially a string parsing problem wrapped in a huge backstory. The questions following this were of the same calibre but just building on top of the first one - and also presenting in the format of walls of text. We do this dance 3 times and I’ve becoming less invested every time as the interviewer just sits there with no interactions. I verbally tell them how I’ll solve the 3rd question, and we ended the interview.
I was disappointed, because Stripe was a really cool company in my mind, but if working there will feel like this, I’d rather pass (turns out they’d also rather pass on me) - so that’s that for now!
