Around October, an Infoblox recruiter approached me on LinkedIn, mentioning they had job openings. I thought of giving it a try, and today, I just finished the onsite interview, only to receive a rejection email an hour later. Let me share my experience from both the interview and recruiting perspectives.
Recruiting:
1) Firstly, this is quite an unusual company, and their recruiters seem to lack some intelligence.
Recruiters don't send emails; they directly call you! It doesn't matter if you're busy or not; if they can't find you, they will reach out to you via LinkedIn messages or emails instead.
2) It is OK for the lack of proper training for the recruiters. However, what baffles me is their coordinator. The invites they sent lack calendar invites. Not only that, for three onsite rounds, they send three separate emails, and you have to confirm each one of them. Each email contains a completely different Zoom link. Why it is so hard to consolidate these meeting invites into one zoom meeting? Even if you can't, at least send them in a summarized email for a candidate to keep an eye on. Why can't they even manage the most basic organizational tasks?
3) No context is provided about what each round will entail. I went through 5 rounds, and not once did they inform me in advance whether it would be a coding or system design round. Basic online IDEs weren't provided, neither for the whiteboard tool.
Interview Loop:
1) First Round: Had a Behavioral Question (BQ) session with a Director. Standard and nothing special.
2) HR Round: Yes, the HR round comes after the first one. Mainly, HR introduced how great Infoblox is, emphasizing its strong culture, compensation, and low turnover rate.
3) Logical Personality Test: Tests leadership potential and personality traits. You have to schedule a meeting with the coordinator for this, under her supervision.
4) Technical Round: I originally thought this was an onsite round, but it's an additional round. Discussed projects, implemented an LRU cache, looked at my side project, and asked why I hadn't found a job since the layoff. Asked questions that seemed unprofessional.
Onsite:
5.1) After the fourth round, no communication. When I followed up, I found out the last interviewer took sick leave. Be professional and at least give feedback before the leave or it will block the interview loop.
5.2) First onsite round: The manager, previously from Amazon, told me they decided to change the role for the interview without informing me in advance. Asked system design questions related to log event collection and persistence in different clusters. Require you to make sure all data will be persistent into same cluster and at the same time to make sure no data skew issue.
5.3) Second onsite round: Data engineer. Discussed a system design problem involving two events (one for device and location information, the other one is for collecting fdqn which is like a click event). I challenged why the two events couldn't be merged and we get all information when it is emitted from the client. He said you could not do that, seems this question was asked for the sake of questions. After the System design was completed, followed by a coding test (Two Sum). Follow up with a 3 sum, and finished them in around 10 mins.
5.4) Third onsite round: Another manager. Asked how to differentiate events with numbers and words to be sent to different queues. Proposed a solution involving adding tags to events. Asked to implement it, At the very beginning, I thought this was another system design. Do I need to implement infra as code and some implementation to call the SQS? Turned out this was a coding question, to check the valid the number, but he was trying his best to trick you by making the question very unclear. This is a question to check a valid number in leetcode, but I can tell he did not have a full understanding on the question, and this is a really bad question to be asked. It only tests nothing except for how you cannot be tricked by the interview. Of course, the interviewer should know the question very well at least before the coding.
5.5) An hour after finishing on-site: Received rejection. Asked for feedback or data points, and they only told me no feedback and good luck. I cannot image how unprofessional this company can do to their interview loop. They made decisions by their feelings or subjects without evaluating the data points.
In summary, the interview experience was poor. The company did not have training for their employees to interview the candidates, they don't even know which part they should cover in the loop and that's why mixed questions will be asked. The interviewer did not know what information they should collect to make the decision and just on their feelings.
I highly doubt their cultures, The so-called friendly culture makes them weak, and don't welcome leadership from someone more capable than themselves.