The Trade Desk interview questions

The interview process started with a phone screen which was quite thorough but the recruiter was incredibly nice and pleasant to talk to. The next step was the on-site interview which was 5 people in 30 minute increments who were all asking the same type of questions - mainly why do you want to work in programmatic advertising. I had come in through an employee referral and had met a few of the other traders in passing. I was coming from a background in finance and became interested in ad tech through a friend and went along consuming as much as I could about the space. Be advised, most of the information is proprietary and new. The interview almost seemed like they didn't want me there or were interested in my background. 3 of the 5 people I interviewed with had no idea what The Trade Desk was prior to joining, by their own admission. 4 out of 5 of them were congenial. I was passionate about joining this company but ultimately, the note I received back was that they wanted someone who was looking to work just there and not ANY job. So, I was penalized for being in the job search. One of the managers openly scoffed at the idea that transparency was important so even to their "core values;" all of that preparation was for nothing. If you aren't recruited directly for a role here, you have no chance of getting a job working as a trader.

Started with a 1 hr video call (screening process). Interviewer talked the entire hour and apologetically did not leave time for me to ask any question. Interviewer had to relinquish the room they were interviewing from and we were done. TDD gave me a coding assignment they believed should take 10+ hours to complete. Upon completing the coding assignment, I was given new requirements for the same project. The new requirements conflicted with the original assignment. Ultimately, I was asked to invest even more time on their exercise. After completing the revisions, the interviewer told me I had failed because of "reason X" and TDD was not going to continue with the interviewing process. I was shocked because my code had "reason X". I asked the interviewer to clarify "reason X" and their response was “Oops, I messed up. Sorry. Your code was just fine.” Frustrating, but this was good news. The next step, my code was reviewed by a different committee. Committee responded back with "you fail because reason X". I just about lost my mind. There are 2 options of what happened: [1] TDD did not spend any time reviewing the time consuming code they asked me to write. [2] TDD code reviewing team is incompetent. Either way, I was relieved the process was over and happy to walk away from this hot mess. As an applicant, this has been my worst experience to date.