The hiring manager reached out to me a good 20 days after applying. He asked me to answer a bunch of questions like why are you interested in Amobee, visa status, whom else you are interviewing with etc. Then set up first coding interview. This was the first of the three coding interviews where each one asked algorithmic questions. I was rejected after 4 rounds in which three were pure coding. None of them asked even one question related to data before rejecting. Each question was weirder then the previous one and I kept wondering why am I even attending these interviews. The last coding was so weird that he went into a 2D space and asked me to solve a problem which he later dubbed was his version of breadth first search.
Seriously I am appalled by the illogical hiring process of the companies in the Bay Area. These guys had data and ad tech requirements, the manager said the team is new to spark and my profile was a perfect fit. Yet they were not interested to know what value I bring to their company. A few algorithms cannot prove the worth of a person. They did not have a defined interview process either. The coding rounds came one after the other while I was expecting an in depth data interview at some point. It takes immense level of foolishness to reject somebody after the third coding round. May be if I had cleared it the next coding round would have been about three dimensional space. Their big data infrastructure was on premise which sounded lame to me. Not sure how they are handling scaling and resource allocation. After all, who hosts a platform completely on premise nowadays. These guys were behind in tech at least by 5 years.
I am glad that I didn’t clear such a meaningless interview. This company is one among several others in San Francisco Bay Area who interview candidates for the purpose of filtering them out.