I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart (Toronto, ON) in Jul 2020
Interview
A recruiter reached out to me on Hired, he followed up with scheduling a phone interview that lasted 15 mins. He decided to move me forward with a technical phone screen that was scheduled a week later. After that phone screen I was moved to the virtual on-site with 4 interviews: 2 coding, 1 system design and 1 bar raiser.
During all the coding interviews I felt like the interviewers did not care and they just pasted a hacker rank question for you to solve without saying much. I asked many clarifying questions, but instead of answering them I was met with dismissal and indifference. Even when proposing a solution and an example no feedback was provided, even after completion.
The system design round was very different compared to the coding ones. My interviewer presented himself and we had a genuine discussion about the system he asked me to design.
The last round was what they call the bar raiser where you have to talk about your past experiences.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Phone Screen: Implement a key-value data structure that uses timestamps (tip: use binary search).
First Coding Round: Parse input from STDIN and implement a password generator.
Second Coding Round: Parse input from STDIN and implement a function to give a winning hand for a card game, a winning hand consists of 3 cards that all the same properties or all different properties.
System Design: Design a system to handle the shopper to pay for a customer order.
3 leetcode interviews, 1 system design, 1 behavioral. leetcode was hard problems and interviewers didn’t provide guidance once exercise started. no ai coding tools allowed. system design was average difficulty.
Following was the process for the Staff role:
- Technical Pre Screening
- Coding round
- 2 System design / Architecture rounds
- Hiring Manager round
If hired:
- Chat with Head of Department
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Instacart (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2021
Interview
I had to take karat interview. The interview itself is not a correct way to evaluate the candidate. You can't get any signal for the company you are interviewing. The interview process is designed around speed with less communication and less thinking process.
After the interview, karat recommendation was to move forward with onsite and the recruiter reached out saying we will be moving forward with onsite. After a week, i was told instacart interviewer who didn't interview me apparently reviewed my video and decided my system design was not up to the mark. The system design part was hardly tested for 2 mins in the karat interview.
I think it is the worst way of treating a prospective employee. Almost like an insult. If the company thinks i am not worth 45 mins of their engineer team, i would rather not work for it.
2
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