I'm going to be doing an onsite at Dropbox in a couple of weeks. One of the interviews is called All-Around interview. I was asked by recruiter to give a 2-3 sentence summary of one of the projects I've worked on, which will be discussed in depth during this phase. I've never been through such a round before - so curious to know what to expect or what's the bar like? Also what are some of the good teams at Dropbox? Recruiter told me matching happens after the onsite and if I get selected.
Feel free to ask the recruiter about details of what to expect in specific interviews. What you describe is a deep dive interview. Here, you will talk about the project you provided in detail and have a whiteboard discussion with the interviewer. For all around, the interviewer will ask about your prior experience on some projects to understand the scope and complexity you have handled in previous projects. This will typically not require white boarding (breadth vs depth). Good luck with the interview!
Thanks! I guess I got confused between deep-dive and the this interview. It's an interesting interview loop for sure. I was told that I would be introduced to some of the teams at the end of the interviews to whom I could match with in the event I got past the onsite? Any teams to avoid as such?
The general cadence does not involve meeting any teams at the end of the day. You will likely meet the hiring manager (for the role you are being pivoted to / considered for) at end of day. You can ask them about the team / role. I would suggest following up later ( once you find out the interview result ) with recruiter about exploring options for other teams which have open roles.
What do you want to get out of Cruise?
It's summed up in a few recent Glassdoor reviews - chaos and clueless leadership. Leadership wants quick short-term fixes and doesn't have patience to build something stable. This leads to loads of tech debt, instability persists and the oncall churn leads to burnout. The equity is also woeful compared to other companies.
Is the oncall load pretty bad for backend teams ?
Has anyone recently interviewed at Dropbox? Rejected or received offer? What are they looking for? Perfect LeetCode solutions? Good technology depth?
Can you share your experience about the onsite at Dropbox?
Yeah I thought I did ok overall but I was rejected. Questions were mostly what I expected - lots of emphasis on concurrency in both coding and system design portions. One coding exercise didn't go so well because the interviewer was expecting me to code the approach that he had in mind. The cultural for round was mostly probing on my recent experience and projects. Overall experience was ok except for one of the coding exercises.
All around is basically the interviewers really digging deep and poking holes into a project you (ideally) led or had major input on. They’ll basically ask why you did this and that. You’ll need to make sure the project scale and your technical contribution are large enough that you can talk at length about all parts of it.