Average Interview – Overall Negative Experience – No – Mon, 25 Jul 2022
Interviewed Jul 2,022 (took 8 days)
It was extremely long and tedious. Would not recommend unless you’re really excited about the domain.
First screening with a recruiter. No biggie.
Then, you do a dumb trivia quiz with an abstract leet code question. Useless and complete waste of time and mental energy. Soured my mood already.
Then I had a prep call with the recruiter and then CarMax HR to prep me for my panels. Another great use of time.
Then I had a long 3 panel interview:
- The first hour was introspective questions around more traditional types of questions about how you work, weaknesses, and dumb stuff. Could have been a casual easy conversation but was drawn out and tedious.
- Then I had a technical discussion. This was somewhat fun as I showed an OSS project I maintain that they were impressed with. Had some discussions on design too… and then *still* had to answer their live coding canned questions around calculating mileage. I did great on that too, but was pretty annoyed that I still had to go through live coding.
- Had a general talk with a designer about the CarMax environment. This was the first time I got to really dig into *anything* about CarMax and learn about how they work. This was 30 minutes.
So at this point I’ve spent several hours on interviews and phone calls with no idea what team I’d be on and no time to ask questions about anything noteworthy with my role save for high level questions and the general setup of teams at CarMax.
I then had another meeting where I finally got to talk with my potential team. They were very impressed with technically, but concerned about something culture wise and drilled me about various things. It was pretty off putting as I’ve been on numerous teams over the years that we’ve already thrived and collaborated well with, but I went with it.
I did get to ask some questions here about the team finally, which was good but still pretty much the only time over the many hours of the process I got to have substantial questions from my end.
Overall, it felt very one sided and I wasn’t a fan and wouldn’t recommend unless you’re really interested in the domain. Culture and teams sounded potentially decent spending where you end up but probably not worth it to jump through all these hoops.
Ended up not getting an offer presumably because of something that came off wrong, but also got no feedback so 🤷♂️
Interview Questions
Describe a time where had to convince a teammate about something
Answer Question
Calculate avg mileage for cars in this dataset
Answer Question
Other Details
The interview consisted of Phone Interview, 1:1 Interview, Group/Panel Interview, IQ/Intelligence Test and Skills Test