Got an email from the recruiter. Scheduled an phone interview within a week. The first phone interview required no coding rather than just one "abstract" question: How will you debug a problem if an end user complaining about slow web page loading. The other question was more a parallel system design question. After the first phone interview, a second phone interview was scheduled. The second phone interview was very "interesting" from my opinion, because the second phone interviewer did NOT even ask a technical question. What i meant was, he was just asking me what question did the first phone interviewer ask me, and then he just asked me to answer it again. He did not even bother to state the question again! I responded with pretty much very similar solution from my first phone interview with a little more refined (improved? I thought more deeply about the same system design question after the first interview, so I believed my response should be at least a little better than the first time I answered it). Within 2 days, I got the "not going to move forward" email from the recruiter. My overall interview experience with LiveRamp is neither "positive" or "negative", because I am more "lost and confused!" Here is the list of reasons why:
1). Both of the phone interviews are little less than 30 minutes.
2). No share document coding exercise during the two phone interviews, which is fine, I guessed, some company like to only do the coding interview for on-site interviews.
3). Technically, there was no question asked in the second phone interview at all. Like I stated above, the interviewer did not even state the question again, instead, he just asked me if I can answered the same question again.
4). After I answered the same question again and pretty much provided a very similar solution (if not better), the interviewer "firmly" said, I quoted, "yes, that would work." After he said that, he then asked me if I have any other questions for the position or the company then end the phone call.
5). Maybe it's just me, I've been interviewing with many software companies, from Google, Facebook, Amazon to IBM, Microsoft and to some startups. This interview experience by far was the weirdest! I can sense that the second phone interviewer is not a very experienced interviewer (NOTE, he sounds like he is a very good engineer and he is a very nice person, but just not having a lot of experience interviewing people) The reason I said that was because I felt I can sense his "excitement" when he said "yes, that would work" after I gave him my answer. I guess because of the "excitement", I didn't expect to receive the "not going to move forward" email. I'm not upset but I am just very confused.
After reading some other reviewer's reviews mentioning they "felt" that LiveRamp is not really hiring but rather than just doing interviews for publicity reason, I have to say I don't agree with that notion. I don't think any legit software company would do that; however, I do have to say their interview process is extremely weird and confusing from my experience. I guessed other reviewers probably had similar confusing experience like I did, maybe that's why they said that.