Docker interview questions

I interviewed for the Senior Software Engineer role in London. The full process ran about six weeks and was seven interviews in total: Recruiter screen with Emily Round 1 — hiring-manager conversation Round 1 — 60-min live coding interview (language of your choice; mine was a string/anagram problem in Go) Round 2 — system-design session on a virtual whiteboard Round 2 — technical discussion where I presented an impactful project (~15 min) followed by Q&A Final round — ~30-min conversational "leadership discussion" with an engineering EVP about background and long-term goals An added meet-and-greet with the engineering manager I'd report to — a new manager who had just joined, so they tacked this on as an extra, final round Kudos to Emily, the recruiter — she was communicative, warm, and fast at every step, set clear expectations, shared specific written feedback after the decision, offered a wrap-up call, and even went out of her way to pitch me to other teams at Docker afterwards. One of the best recruiter experiences I've had.

Docker provided me with the most bizarre interview experience. HR and the first round of interview were wonderful, and I thought that this indicated that all of the reviews here on Glassdoor were wrong. Once I got to the second round, I realized nope, these reviews are correct. It almost feels like at higher levels, there are no real professionals doing the job, but just people that happen to have found their way into Docker. There’s a complete lack of communication, complete lack of imagination, and complete lack of clarity. You are expected to do the thinking for them and magically hit on the head the points they want to hear about. If you don’t magically hit those nails on the head, you are accused of not knowing your stuff and not providing details. And they want to hear about these things without giving you guidance about what they want to hear and without them asking any relevant questions during the interview. I am convinced that anyone that made it into Docker did it by sheer luck. This is not to say they’re not talented and don’t deserve the job, I’m sure they do, but they just accidentally happened to hit all the information that the interviewers wanted. In my case, the interviewers that I dealt with were distracted and ill prepared. I was definitely the most prepared person in the room.