I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Dropbox (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2017
Interview
I had two technical phone screens, which were spread across three weeks. This was a rather slow pace, in my opinion. The scheduling was a bit disorganized and the interviews never started on time. Interviewers were not helpful whatsoever. They seemed extremely disinterested and did not even leave time for questions. I was shocked.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a log_hit function for a website. Then record the total number of hits in the last five minutes and return the number.
Given a dictionary, produce all valid 3, 4, and 7 letter words from a string of numpad digits i.e. 228 is "cat".
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Dropbox in Mar 2015
Interview
One of my wife's friends is Dropbox employee, he submitted my resume to the hiring manager. A recruiter emailed me the next day to schedule a phone screen interview. We spent about 40 minutes on the phone talked about my past experience, the position, and the company. The recruiter told me he will talked to 2 teams' dev leads and ask them if they want to conduct a phone interview or a take home interview. The recruiter didn't ping me for 4 days, so I emailed him and ask for the status. He told me that he forgot to send me the take home interview and ask me they have 2 take home interviews to choose from. Since this is a front end position, I chose a "build a web page" interview (The other one is algorithm quiz). I spent almost 28 hours to create this web page in the 5 days period (well I still have my full time job). The project is not super hard but it is very time consuming. 5 days after I submitted the solution, the recruiter emailed me and said the team decided not to move forward with the interview process. I called the recruiter and ask for feedback so I can improve myself next time I have this type of interview. The recruiter was trying to be nice, but I got the idea that the guys who looked at my code think I copied and paste some of the CSS code from Boostrap framework. My defense would be that I was very familiar with Bootstrap, so some code I wrote could be inspired by Bootstrap. Hey if you take a close look at some responsive frameworks out there, they are all very similar. I also asked how much time did other candidates spend on the same take home interview. The recruiter told me some good one spent 8 or 12 hours. I didn't say it out loud, but I want to say "this is BS", no one could possibly finish the project within 8 hours. If he or she spend only 12 hours, I would be extremely impressive, and consider her/his solution is very buggy.
Overall, I learned a lot after I finished the project since I have limit exposure to CSS3 animation and transition. I am very proud of what I built. However, I am a little pissed because I spend numbers of hour on the interview and I think I deserve at least an in-person interview which I didn't get.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Take home interview. The recruiter send me instruction and assets that i can download. The project was to build a page for the dropbox business clients. He gave me a mock which contain the visual design of the page and font size, font color, and look and feel color scheme. I can use jQuery but not other 3rd party JS code.