Compass Software Engineer interview questions

Interviewing with Compass was a microcosm of what's wrong with the Seattle startup scene. While I'm sure Compass is a decent company to work for doing cool things, I would only recommend interviewing here for practice, and nothing more. 0. Remember, interviewing is a 2-way street, and when I interview, I have a simple bar for every interviewer: "Would I want to work with this person 8 hours a day?" Every single interviewer failed this assessment. The interviewers just stemmed from having minimal soft skills to the overly-aggressive manager type who talks AT you rather than talking to you. The reason this point is #0 is because this sets the tone for everything else. If Compass just had employees with people skills, then the rest of the points wouldn't be a problem and I could consider a company for their culture. 1. "Hey, we pay less than FAANG, and actually we pay less than what you pay now, but we're going to ask you harder questions because we have a bar that's arbitrarily higher than it should be. This Dynamic Programming/Leetcode Hard question will surely prove that they're a better engineer! Oh, but our interviewer bar isn't actually that high and coordinated so prepare to repeat yourself many times, deal with our interviewers who have limited soft skills, and answer the same questions over and over." 2. "Oh and I know Google/Facebook will skip the phone screen if you have competing offers, but for you since you have competing offers, we'll make you do 2 phone screens and take months to get to the onsite from the initial recruiter call." Such an agile startup! 3. A lot of my interviewers were ex-Amazon and were giving that "Amazon vibe" during the interview, I'll direct you to the NYT article for further reading. If I wanted to work for Amazon, I would go there. I don't even work here and I was getting that alpha-nerd/tech-bro vibes that are mentioned in the reviews. It felt like a nerdy Mad Men. I would hate to be a woman here or any other URM. 4. "We're in a cramped WeWork that looks like an industrial IKEA prison; why wouldn't you want to spend 9 hours a day here?"