Had my virtual on-site a few weeks ago. Felt like I did really well in the first 3 sessions (behavioral and 2 coding), had a lunch break, then totally hit a wall in the 4th... interviewer joined late and jumped right into the problem- it was a problem I had just done in another session so I told him such. He then moved on to another problem. Long story short, couldn’t get any dialog going, no real idea what to do, totally bombed but felt like the guy just didn’t even want to be there. Needless to say this shook me for my final 5th interview as well. I immediately reached out to my recruiter and let him know how things had gone. He said G does so many coding sessions to rule out outliers and not to worry. A few days later, he gave me a call and said my interview feedback lined up exactly with what I had described- very strong performance in the first 3 and then trash (not his exact words lol). He said G wanted to do 2 more coding rounds to replace my last two- said he’d never seen this happen before. Had the final round the other day. I struggled in the first one, but got code done. Had very good dialog throughout, probably (definitely) had some mistakes/missing pieces in the code... I’d give my performance a C at best. Ironically, I think the second session had a much more complex problem, but I crushed it. Wrote the optimal solution in a few minutes, moved on to the more complex version and again wrote a solid solution. Had time for questions after- asked my interviewer how he’d improve my solution and he said I had written one of the two solutions he had in mind... I think I probably did A-, maybe even A in this one. Should I expect an offer? I’m hoping the strong performance will pull up the weaker one. Am I correct in assuming my first 3 sessions from the original round must’ve been considered strong to even get the opportunity for additional sessions? Any insight appreciated.
I'd say you'll get an offer. Where you'll hit the wall is when negotiating comp or for leveling. That's where they'll start bringing this stuff up and ding you
Yeah, wouldn’t be surprised, but honestly I’d be happy with pretty much any offer. Would be really excited to work on large scale projects and I feel I’d grow way more as an engineer than in my current role. 🤞🏼🤞🏼 hopefully not stuck waiting for feedback too long!
Get competing offers in any case for google
Good luck let us know how it turns out
Thanks!
Good luck homie. Sounds like you did well.
Thanks! Hoping my bad session wasn’t as bad as I thought and that my strong was as strong 😅 have you ever heard of the extra coding sessions to replace earlier ones occurring before?
It’s happened before with candidates. I’ve heard of it before for sure for onsites.
Hiring committee will request additional interviews if the first slate of interviews doesn't provide sufficient information. For example if someone asked a duplicate question and HC doesn't think the remainder of that interview was informative enough about your abilities.
Update: just received preliminary feedback- got strong signals from the extra rounds and will be moving forward 👍👍 Not sure yet if I’ll do team matching before or after HC- recruiter said he should be able to let me know tomorrow or the next day. What should I expect from here? How does team match work, and what’s the difference between doing it before or after? Slightly weaker feedback = try to match with a team before HC?
At this point, it's rare for HC to need any additional info from a team match. If they asked for 2 additional interviews, they probably already knew what they were looking for and will either see it or not see it in the interview results. It's not impossible for them to ask for a team match before proceeding, but if they had enough doubts in the first round to require additional interviews *and* a team match, that might be enough doubt to just pass altogether and not waste anyone's time with the follow-up interviews.
Not giving any guarantees or even predictions because I obviously don't have any of the info about your packet... just relaying the most common scenarios I've seen.
No offer
LessTC for me I guess