Compass Software Engineer interview questions

TL;DR: Trust the employee engineering reviews. After being yanked around and made to reinterview, I was told team wants to make an offer (over the phone) only to learn that the CTO actually doesn't want to hire remote IC1s. HR screen -> technical screen -> onsite is the general cadence of things. HR screen and tech screen went smoothly. Most of the onsite was also okay, had 1 truly excellent interviewer, 2 that were friendly but maybe needed some practice to keep things on track, however the "manager session" interviewer did not ask me any questions about my background and gave me a complex technical question, so in total I had 4 technical sessions instead of 3+behavioral (which is what they prepped me for). This might have been fine except that every time I asked a clarifying question about the problem or asked if they could follow my approach they said nothing. I kept checking the video call to see if they were even still present or if they were accidentally muted because it was so quiet. After this the recruiter called to give me feedback, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive but the manager still had one question about something I supposedly didn't understand so they asked if I'd be open to one more technical screen. I completed this and got positive feedback again, but then manager from the onsite decided that they probably wanted the team to be all senior level engineers so things were still up in the air. I then get another call from the recruiter saying that the team decided to move forward with putting together an offer at IC1 and they just need to get final approval from the CTO before sending it over. Next afternoon I get a call saying that the CTO does not have the framework to hire any new IC1s to be remote, at least for the next 6-12 months. Seems more likely to me that the team changed their mind again (as I doubt Compass is still unable to figure out how to support new IC1s remotely after 6 months being remote).

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.