DraftKings interview questions

After receiving many LinkedIn messages from DraftKings over the last several months, I finally decided to give it a chance and interview. I was skeptical of the business model, which is basically just gambling, but certainly interested in fantasy sports. Phone screen was remarkably easy. Two questions around ranking a set of scores and comparing two fantasy rosters. I was allowed to use .NET libraries, so I didn't really have to even implement the sort or compare. In person, they took me to a small room with two chairs, a small table, and a whiteboard. First interviewer brought in a laptop with Visual Studio and said I had 45 minutes to implement a fantasy football lineup validator with a given set of rules. I was not given a mouse, so I had to use the horrible Lenovo touchpad. He said he would come back every 15 minutes to check my progress, but he forgot to do this. Fortunately the program was pretty simple and I managed to finish it in time thanks to my experience with keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio. (If I had not been a VS expert, with no mouse, this would have basically been impossible to finish in 45 minutes. Not to mention how confusing it would have been if I had been unfamiliar with fantasy football.) Second interviewer came in carrying the board game Battleship. He said it was an object-oriented design question, and asked me to design a program to play Battleship. I asked him if he wanted me to just talk through it or write on the board, and he said whatever I was more comfortable with. So I started to draw a simple picture and started to describe the data structures I would need. Battleship is a quite simple game, so I was done with this in around 10 minutes. At this point the tiny whiteboard was mostly full, and there was no eraser in the room - so I was basically done writing, though I tried to write over some stuff at some points. The next 30 minutes were incredibly awkward. The interviewer asked me a bunch of detailed questions about how the objects would interact, and suggested that I describe how a C# console application might use these objects. I talked through that. Whatever I was saying was clearly not what he was looking for - I have no idea what he was looking for. I started talking about performance optimizations and possible feature enhancements, but didn't get much of a response. After 45 minutes (of what was supposed to be a 60 minute interview, I think), he said he had no more questions and left. The only thing I can think is that he actually wanted me to write the code for the program - which I never did, of course, because he said it was a design question and never asked me to code (and the eraser-less whiteboard was full, anyway). Less than a minute later, the recruiter comes in and abruptly ends the interview. Tells me the design interview went badly and suggests maybe it's because I don't design programs every day. (Which I do, by the way.) Then he walks me out of the office and points me to the elevator. I am a highly experienced software interviewer - on both sides of the table, interviewer and interviewee, with several top tech companies - and have never seen such a poor process or poor candidate experience. I wasn't sure I was interested in working at DraftKings coming in, and now I just feel bad for everyone whose time they are wasting in the interview process. I guess this is what happens when you get $300M in funding and just have to interview and hire at warp speed - quality gets lost in the process.

Process was very fast, applied online, spoke to the recruiter and had technical phone interview within 24 hours. A half day on-site two days later. My schedule was really busy at my current job and they were flexible to let me start later in the afternoon. Interview was a programming exercise and design exercise. The recruiter came in to tell me that I was cut after the design exercise. He was very empathetic and gave feedback that made sense. The two engineering interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to. I think that I have the stuff for the job but work a little slower than they want. All in all it was a good experience and I'm sure the hire great engineers.