I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Whatnot (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2025
Interview
Very straightforward
1. Recruiter screening
2. HM screening
3. VO (1 SD, 1 Coding)
I failed in the SD according to the recruiter's feedback. The SD round interviewer looked easy to me, but that's big trap. After I listed the functional requirements and non-functional requirements, I asked her if that covered all I need to talk about. She smiled and said "I am not going to answer this question" During the whole interview process, she was friendly and didn't ask very hard questions. At the end, she gave a fake signal that I was doing ok. However, the next day recruiter called to tell me that SD interviewer gave a "no-hire". Damn..
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
SD: design a charity donation app that works for 7 days
Coding:
1. merge two integer list by asc order of the number's square value, which contains integer,
[-5,-3,2,1] , [-2,3] -> [1,4,4,9,9,25]
2. removed the repeated chars in a string
"aaabbcccd"->"d"
only through email to arrange and follow up, not very clear procedure, and you may receive many emails from many people and some maybe system emails, I guess it's a small company, not well arranged for this
Very clear interview process and a great recruiting team and a cool company.
However, the work isn't special but the interviewers have a high standard for some reason -- any basic tenured dev can do the work lol apparently looking for "cream of the crop"
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basic Software design question -> explain building a web api and then some follow-ups
Coding interview: merge two arrays and sort them based on their squared value: [1,3,7] and [4,10,11] -> simple solution with two pointers
remove duplicates in a string
Some behavioral questions
After going through several recruitment stages, including a home task challenge, the feedback received was vague and unhelpful. As usual, there was no transparency or clear explanation regarding the reasons behind rejecting the application.
