Their engineer had poor interviewing skills. The phone screen interviewer didn't communicate clearly, I could hardly understand what he was saying, he literally spent half of my time just talking about his team's project, all I could understand were three words: database, service and API. The fact that they give you a verbatim Leetcode question is a red flag. It shows the lack of creativity and engineering in the company. I got the impression they're just a tech wannabe so they just throw same set of copy-pasted coding puzzles at you, despite the fact they're irrelevant to the challenges they're solving and the actual work being done on a daily basis.
The Karat interviewer did an excellent job in interviewing, I was pleased to be interviewed by a trained interviewer with senior level experience. The Compass interviewer was so incompetent in interviewing that I lost interest in working with them.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Compass (Bellevue, WA)
Interview
Pretty chill. Three rounds of debugging, technical (leetcode), and behavioral, which was more like high-level with AI assistance. The values did not come up very much while going through the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had us do an AI round about forms and matching things.
Debugging, technical, then behavioral. I had been given two language options for the debugging portion (Java or Python) during the phone interview then when I went to the onsite there seemed to be a miscommunication because the interview said I could use JS since I was applying as a frontend engineer. The debugging was pretty doable, the behavioral was odd but fine.
The interview process felt chaotic and poorly organized. What I was asked in the interview didn’t align with what HR told me to expect, and the interview started late. The lack of alignment between HR and the interviewer made it feel like the company overall may be chaotic. Afterward, HR’s follow-ups were generic and robotic, and the employer also mentioned layoffs, which added to the uncertainty. Overall, it didn’t feel worth the effort.
