I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Compass (New York, NY) in Oct 2018
Interview
The recruiter was nice and very accommodating when it came down to rescheduling and setting up interviews. I had 2 technical interviews via coderpad (one was front-end focused, plain JS), the other was pure DS&A (Leetcode mediums). Ended up going to onsite 2 weeks later, which consisted of 5 rounds: 2 system design interviews, 1 lunch and 2 technical/coding questions about front-end. The engineers seemed pretty friendly, also spoke with their VP of Engineering who was constantly on his phone throughout the interview and was not concerned with what was going on in the room. He seemed rushed and, when answering my questions, seemed to indicate that the company was focusing too much on the business side of things in the past and not engineering (not a good sign) and that they're trying to change that by tripling their engineering headcount. I feel like I came extremely prepared and knowledgeable about the company, got along with the engineers and answered their questions pretty well but in the end I wasn't able to convince everyone.
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Compass in Jun 2018
Interview
First call was with an internal recruiter, mostly to get an understanding of what Compass does.
Second step was a technical phone screen with a Software Engineer there. I am on Pacific Time. Their internal coordinator scheduled an appointment for 11am Eastern, which I was okay with (8am PT). By 8:15am, I heard nothing so I emailed them and they apologized and asked if I could do 11am PT, to which I reply positively.
My interviewer calls in 20 minutes late and pastes some code scaffolding into the coderpad and is clearly distracted. It's a spellcheck algorithm. I begin to ask her questions and discuss possible solutions. She admits that she is working on other stuff and tells me to 'just work through the problem' because she doesn't give hints. I start working through the problem with a basic approach and she stops me by saying that although she doesn't give hints, she felt that I was going down the wrong path. I was provided no constraints or really any direction, even when I requested clarification.
She left about 3 minutes at the end of the interview for me to ask a few questions, to which she replied with one or two words. Overall, probably the one of the worst technical phone interviews I have ever had.