The interviews with the recruiter and manager went really well, but the one with the Test Engineer was a bit less smooth. It seemed like they might have been training a colleague on how to conduct interviews. They were friendly, but in the end I realized their expectations hadn’t been clearly communicated during the call. It also took some effort to receive feedback, which was surprising considering that openness to feedback is listed as one of the company’s core values.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Netflix cultural memo and regular tests and autotests related questions.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in May 2015
Interview
I was contacted by in-house Netflix recruiter. The process was very streamlined and everybody from start to finish were friendly.
There were phone screens with Recruiting, HR, then the hiring manager, lunch with hiring manager, then a full day of interview with 6 people of all kinds of titles.
Everybody was highly competent, clearly knowledgeable in their area of expertise and from the moment you walk in the door and get handed your little care package with water, snacks and your schedule neatly printed, you are made to feel like you are important, you matter.
Sadly, the first interviewer who is considered a strong leader by his boss, showed up with very poor personal hygiene, which really put me off. His entire appearance was disrespectful in the context of interviews. NOT what I would consider a stunning colleague. My distaste must have shown, because he said my personality was too strong for Netflix.
Translation : If she was a man, I would say he is ambitious and a go-getter, somebody who really knows their stuff and is confident in their area of expertise.
In general do your homework, don't waste their time by showing up unprepared. Netflix likes to hire and demote. If you were a VP before, consider being a manager now. If you're a Senior Architect, consider coming to Netflix as a tester. Etc. The pay should more than make up for the lack of title.
It's a place where I can see myself fitting in very comfortably, because the business is extremely complex and fun and everybody is driven and highly competent. I suppose it's just a matter of finding a correct fit for a team. I think I might have outgrown dev and testing entirely. This interview process really helped to cement that for me, so I'm really grateful for that.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Interviewer drew out the relevant part of their architecture on the board and asked me to debug why a message would seem to get stuck in the network somewhere. This is a real problem they faced