I was recently reached out by a Datadog recruiter for their SE position in Boston/NY through LinkedIn.First-round was a live coding session with 2 of their engineers. I was able to solve the 2 problems (LC medium-easy) with an optimal solution as per me but I still got a reject for the following reasons. 1. Answer to one of the challenges me/my team faced sounded vague for the team 2. Iterating through each character of the string is not optimal even if there is no solution out there faster than O(n) 3. Even though my answer to the 2nd question was correct I used a class-level variable for getting to the solution. As a person who takes the interviews myself, I didn't find these to be valid reasons for rejection. Well, what do you know looks like this wasn't for me! #datadog #seinterview #reject Current TC: 190K YOE: 4.5
Honestly #3 was probably the one that finished you. Writing code thats safe for many concurrent users is something they don’t really teach in most college curriculums, every new grad new hire I’ve ever hired or mentored I’ve had to break of global scoped variable misuse as they did their best to introduce brutally difficult to diagnose bugs. At 4.5 YOE going for (I assume) a mid-level role that sort of thing is a yellow flag at minimum, because it really should he deeply ingrained into your soul not to do that shit if you’ve been succeeding at a backend type role. This is assuming this is for one of datadogs many mostly backend type roles. If you got bounced from a pure frontend web dev role for that you just got hosed.
Yes I do agree from a good programming perspective 3 isn’t the ideal approach. Well you know interviews can also take a toll on the candidates and sometimes we rush to get the optimal solution ASAP as there is a time limit as well. Anyways no complains I learned my lesson the hard way. Also this was a front end role.
My gut says there was some other reason. The reasons they gave you are nitpicky and superficial. Could be they knew who they wanted to hire going in and your interview was anti-nepotism fodder. Could be you were too diverse. Could be you weren't diverse enough. Could be the guy who left decided to come back, and it's not good form to cancel an already scheduled interview. Could also be they really are that anal. Could be a missed opportunity, could be a missed bullet. You'll likely never know. Your either give it another shot when another job gets posted or move on to someone else and forget about them.