I also interviewed with Reddit, although it was a few years back at this point.
I thought I nailed their code challenge and expected to continue through the process, but after that session that was pretty much the last I heard from them. It was pretty disappointing.
Had the same experience tbh. interview with an engineer, code challenge, final interview with the CEO, then ghosted. Reached out a month and a half later and got a reply that they didn't pick me. Nice.
I spent days almost 10 hours, completing a massive interview project for one company. I submitted a fully working solution, had unit test, was pixel perfect, and they didn't even give me an interview.
Not only that they gave me a vague reason, only after pressing for feedback.
Left a very bad taste in my mouth, don't think I'll be doing code assignments again, what a waste of time.
(Vanity compels me to share: I was probably going to ask for more money than they would have been willing to pay. But before a former CEO pops in this thread to reveal that I was actually incompetent, I must say that I think I put on a good show. The weekend prior to being flown out to SF, I spent a day analysing their server code and was able to not only find a fairly subtle bug but propose a fix for it.)
I've interviewed with them twice (2016 & 2022), didn't receive any feed back other than a generic decline e-mail. And this was despite promises to the contrary from recruiters, I was ghosted when I asked for it too. I even recall teaching the interviewer some javascript quirk during a coding challenge the first time and solved whatever silly brain teaser question that was asked, with test cases too! Yet zero feedback as to why I was not going to move past that first technical challenge. Disappointing really.
EDIT: More on topic, I did really enjoy the MR based technical interview way more than the common coding challenge.
As a counterpoint, I found their interview process so frustrating and disorganized that I gave up on them and told them I was no longer interested...
They do both an online programming test, and an in person “code in front of us” test + whatever else. They don’t make it clear up front what the interview process is, and often drop the ball... miss appointments etc.
A while back I did multiple interviews and completed a coding project with your company and was "ghosted." A buddy of mine just had a similar experience via a "HackerNews Who's Hiring" post, they had multiple interviews with you and were assigned a coding project and then you responded with a terse canned rejection email. Definitely not a good experience and seemed disrespectful of others time.
Had a colleague have a similar interview with Reddit for an infosec/appsec role. They said it was a shit show, no feedback, never heard back. Sourced through an external recruiter, so Reddit is burning some recruiter's time churning through candidates. Picked up by someone in finance at similar comp a few days later.
Multiple interviews, I did a technical coding test for them in my free time. I even received verbal feedback from HR that they wanted to proceed and would be sending a formal offer.
The formal offer kept being delayed and they ended up pulling the position. What a waste of everyone's time.
I did the project (back when that was an option on TripleByte) and failed it. They said I could still try the pure technical interview option, but then ignored me when I asked for that (albeit more than a year later).
Not sure how common but this has happened to me as well. Coding challenge complete, follow-up interview scheduled... then cancelled. Rescheduled... then ghosted.
It was a cheap way of figuring out I shouldn’t even consider working there.
Ten years ago I interviewed for the head QA and Community Manager position. I flew out, did interviews, got back, even received an offer for the job, but then I was told the offer was rescinded because they felt they didn't need to fill that position.
Ten years later, people don't know the project exists, it doesn't have a forum or community.
- home assignment ( you can find it on my GitHub with the name 2048 )
- discussion of the assignment with the same devs of the technical
After every step they said they were very impressed, I did reach the step where they were scheduling the final interview with the CTO then they weren't able to schedule it and they disappeared for months with the excuse of hiring freeze. Apparently they hired someone else and they decided to put me on hold indefinitely
I actually had one of these and I won't do another one either.
Here's the gist of how it went down:
1) first part was the "personality" interview. Two "HR" people blew smoke up my ass for about 30 minutes about how awesome my site and my work was, then asked me to do a "code challenge". I agreed - I mean, how bad could it be?
2) The code challenge. I was given a PSD with a straight forward design. Asked to code it, make sure it worked in legacy browsers, publish on a server and show them the code on GitHub
3) Passed and then was asked to come back and explain some of my coding decisions. I was told this was more for show and I was already in effect hired, I just had to pass this last hurdle. It turned out to be a very confrontational, inquisition type of an interview. Not at all the type of laid back code review I'm used it.
I got pretty frustrated by the two "Senior" devs who seemed to take great pride in tearing my code and my decisions apart. After my first heated exchange with one of the devs, I actually asked them how many of the sites listed in the gallery on their site they actually tested and validated the code on. They said "All of them, why do you ask?" I told them I actually ran all of their sites through the W3C validation site and none of them passed. Every single one had over 60 errors on it. I basically said, "If standards are so important to you, then why are you holding people who don't even work for your company to a higher standard than those who actually do?"
There was a long silence and then I finally spoke up and said, "Clearly, this company has its priorities in the wrong order. Thank you for time, but I'm not interested." and got up and walked out.
I got several worried calls from the company recruiter, but by then I was so pissed at how much of my time they had wasted, and vowed never to do something like it again.
Yeah, this reminds me of the "interview" I did for SpiderOak. I had built and launched various products by myself by then, so my experience in Web apps was very prominent in my resume. They asked me to spend a few hours implementing a commenting FAQ system or something like that, which was pretty much just some CRUD views with CAPTCHAs etc.
I said I didn't really feel comfortable spending hours of work on something for an interview, but I did it anyway, because it sounded like an interesting company to work for. They took my submission, said something about "we'll see if we can arrange some compensation" and then never emailed me again.
A few weeks later, their FAQ section was updated with pages and a commenting system. Worst interview ever.
To be fair the recruiter said it was a generic interview - I spent the week studying data structures & algorithms. And then I get on the phone and the entire interview was on JavaScript and how to hack around the same origin policy.
Early on in Ello's life, possibly year 1, I interviewed for a job with them - back when their office was basically one floor of a residence, and all the engineers pretty much worked at a single dinner table packed with monitors. I probably scored the interview because of my previous experience as CTO of a startup social network for people who wanted social change (which we sold to Gaiam, and that's how it eventually died a few years later, but at least I ended up in the Denver/Boulder area).
Anyway, the code test part of the interview involved pairing with another engineer on a small portion of the ello User model (their application was built with Ruby on Rails at the time), and I remember being rather underwhelmed by what they asked me to do, at least in terms of whether it provided a decent test of my abilities. I ended up sending a follow-up email expressing that, along with numerous polished samples of other project work.
They ended up passing on me, but I stayed a member of ello for a while longer because I thought the idea might have promise. Maybe I left too early, but I eventually ditched it because... there was no "there", there.
I liked their general idea, but... they could have done so much more with it, even with a small team. As it was, I left before ello ever got out of its "tumblr clone with way too much empty space" phase - if it ever did.
I thought I nailed their code challenge and expected to continue through the process, but after that session that was pretty much the last I heard from them. It was pretty disappointing.
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