I applied online. I interviewed at Goodnotes (London, England) in Sept 2025
Interview
Had an initial call and then a hackerank test.
Let me preface this by saying that I understand there’s high competition for such a great company but using hackerank is a joke of a process, especially now in the age of AI and how the test makes it difficult for no reason.
Hackerank HAS been a staple in testing prospective candidates but not anymore to a point where it’s a detriment to the company using it. The change? The locking down of your ability to use your own IDE to do the question and then paste your answer in the browser. If you paste anything in the browser it counts as a fail as they immediately assume you used AI and cheated. You can’t even copy code or text from the question. What’s more is that if you decide that you’ll type out the answer again once you’re confident, you have to be careful not to leave the browser for too long as inactivity kicks you out with no way to get back in. You might be thinking: Well this is all to prevent cheating so deal with it! But no it doesn’t. If I really wanted to cheat I could have done. I have another computer, phone, hell I could have even dictated it to someone else to give me the answer or to help me out, but I decided to give this a fair shot as everyone should.
But what about just using the browser! Surely it couldn’t be that bad. Yes it is that bad. Maybe this would work for simple questions, but for the level of difficulty Goodnotes gives you, which is a medium level difficulty, you need all the help you can get when you debug your solution in the time given, whether that’s test data or print statements. Even the most basic compilation issues that would immediately be flagged up in a playground before you hit play. With the browser you have to spend time working it out which could have gone to getting all the test cases to pass.
This was such a frustrating experience, next time I’m going to avoid companies who do this.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You have to determine which / how many requests allowed/blocked based on the limit they specify and whether it comes from a unique ip
I applied online. I interviewed at Goodnotes (London, England) in Dec 2025
Interview
7 Stage process, hackerrank, leetcode pair programming, multi stage onsite. technical stages comprise of lettcode easy/medium questions around sets and string manipulation. onsite focuses on product understanding and project managament.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A user is entering text into a search box, implement a function that handles requests as the user types whilst minimising calls to the backend API.
The process took one month across four rounds before rejection. There were 6 rounds planned. Communication was inconsistent, as I was promised 24-hour feedback windows that extended to a week — twice.
I failed at the culture fit interview with two recruiting managers. The rejection cited "insufficient detail" despite being asked not to elaborate on details during the interview. They also said strange things like “it’s clear that the candidate has considerable experience, but cannot structure it properly”. The real reason was, most likely, in that they interpreted my story about influencing a VP’s decision at my past job as violation of their “disagree and commit” value. So, probably their value is more like “under no circumstances influence upward”.
The devs that conducted technical sessions were very nice. However, I didn’t like the management vibe, seemed to me quite authoritarian. Will make a point to avoid this organization in the future. This took way too much of my time.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Two technical sections: algorithms, platform knowledge, asynchronous programming, creating a schema for storing and efficiently retrieving the data.
