I had two stages, a recruiter screen and a technical interview.
The recruiter screen was actually kind of a highlight. Marcus was great and I genuinely enjoyed chatting with him. Kind of what you'd expect in terms of questions, but wanted to call it out since it was a really good experience.
Technical interview was interesting and a bit odd, kind of a mixed bag here. The role was for an Android engineer so I was pleased to see the interview focused on practical Android stuff. We started with some discussion about my technical background and experience then went into a handful of Android/Kotlin related questions.
After that there was a coding portion. Here is where things got odd. The interview invite email indicated this entire call would be 45 minutes so by the time we were done with the first part of the interview, I had about 25 minutes to tackle this, which made me feel a bit anxious and I rushed a bit more than I liked. Turns out the call went the whole hour though - I wish this was clearer so I didn't rush so much early on.
The coding portion itself involved Jetpack Compose, implementing a list of items. Mostly straight forward, but this is all done in what is essentially online notepad. Not coderpad or something like that, just plain text editor. No code completion, no syntax highlighting, no auto formatting. I really think they should reconsider not allowing the candidate to use Android Studio. I found using this plain notepad-like interface tedious and for a coding challenge that seems committed to more closely resembling real life Android development, conducting it like this felt counterintuitive.
There also seemed to be some misunderstanding about the instructions. The interviewer told me before we began that exact syntax wasn't a big deal and that I could use pseudo code to illustrate my thoughts. To me this meant implementing the necessary data class, view model, and repository would be more pseudo code with the Compose portion being more important, but when I wrote up some pseudo code the interviewer became a bit nitpicky about exact syntax. I also wouldn't describe this interview as collaborative in the way many technical interviews try to be in an effort to simulate a pair programming situation, this felt very much like a guy watching and evaluating/grading me. Not a big deal, just want to point it out to set expectations.
Overall, I felt this interview went well but was surprised to not get invited to the next round. All good though, it happens. I do think they could really iron out several kinks in this technical interview step, but I still consider it positive since it was actually Android related and not the leetcode stuff we see so often.