Summary: Netflix seems to be an awesome place to work at. Everyone I talked to seemed like a top performer and also seem to make every effort to keep their culture in line with what they have published publically. I am one of those guys who calls BS when he reads culture decks because in my experience once a company grows beyond certain point, every team defines its own culture but Netflix seemed like an exception and I wish every company could embress or at least imbibe what they have culturally.
Even though I don't anticipate an offer my recommendation is to focus more on questions that you generally expect from HR and managers. Those are the tough ones and as engineer I think many of us do poorly in this area. Things that we should definitely know but are hard to express. For example the questions like Why Netflix? What do you want from your ideal job? What is the best environment for you to be successful? I am sure in your head you know what it is but make an effort to verbalize it. They are trying to judge if you will fit with a unique culture that they have worked so hard to develop and preserve and your technical ability is important but still not as important(or at least as important) as their culture.
* A call with recruiter to align my interests with position
* A call with director to I guess vet the basic culture fit
* A call with manager , again for both basic culture fit and technical assessment
* A technical phone screen.
* Onsite:
Recruiter: Culture fit and making sure I understand how they are different from most companies.
Dev manager: Explained what the team does in more details , described what is expected of the person who would join the team, the challenges and the road map that he has for the team. Overall he did everything in his power to give me as much information possible as he can to make the right decision if they extended an offer.
Sr. Engineer: Describe one of the challenging problems you have solved and discussed the design decisions I made. Pretty awesome guy and he was smart so it was very stimulating discussion, for a second I forgot I am interviewing. He asked a coding question which was something that lot of us have to use in real life not one of those trick questions.
Dev manager/engineer from a sister team: Again awesome guy. Asked a system design question. Again we had a discussion that you expect to have when designing a solution with your teammates. He brought up some good points and I change my design accordingly. The biggest mistake I made was mathematical (confused gb with mb iirc) but he did not really point that out and let me focus on the crux of the problem.
At this point I was given a lunch break and I was told in the beginning that I will have 3 more rounds depending on how the first 4 round goes. I am not sure what it means if you get to next round, it can either mean there was not enough evidence to reject you or it can mean there is enough evidence to keep going but we can all just guess. Anyhow, if you don't go beyond this point , please understand that you have been rejected. I was given the opportunity to move forward.
Director: This was the second hardest interview for me. She talked about projects where i had slipped the delivery dates and what i have done to rectify those situation. I think I failed to verbalize things correctly but overall she tried to extract as much info as she could to figure out my personality and working style.
Sr. Director: Talked about a challenging design problem and how netflix was a pretty awesome place to work at. Also enquired about the reason for leaving , how netflix will be different or not for those reasons. Again I believe this was culture fit assessment.
VP: This was my worst interview of the day. May be because I was tired, may be because the VP just somehow felt intimidating, I am not sure. He asked me to tell him what feedbacks my colleagues might give about me. It was more of a wake up call for me that I really did not have much to say in this regard until ofcourse the interview was over. He also discussed one of the projects on my resume and how I would have changed things.
Overall I was very happy with the interview process. I hate interviews where you don't endup learning anything and unless you get an offer it becomes one wasted day. This was different. Given my poor responses in the final 3 rounds I don't anticipate an offer but I hope others learn from my mistakes. The key is to think hard about these culture questions that you probably think you know the answers to but don't know how to communicate to others. Good luck.
