I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Compass (New York, NY) in Aug 2020
Interview
TL;DR: Trust the employee engineering reviews. After being yanked around and made to reinterview, I was told team wants to make an offer (over the phone) only to learn that the CTO actually doesn't want to hire remote IC1s.
HR screen -> technical screen -> onsite is the general cadence of things. HR screen and tech screen went smoothly. Most of the onsite was also okay, had 1 truly excellent interviewer, 2 that were friendly but maybe needed some practice to keep things on track, however the "manager session" interviewer did not ask me any questions about my background and gave me a complex technical question, so in total I had 4 technical sessions instead of 3+behavioral (which is what they prepped me for). This might have been fine except that every time I asked a clarifying question about the problem or asked if they could follow my approach they said nothing. I kept checking the video call to see if they were even still present or if they were accidentally muted because it was so quiet.
After this the recruiter called to give me feedback, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive but the manager still had one question about something I supposedly didn't understand so they asked if I'd be open to one more technical screen. I completed this and got positive feedback again, but then manager from the onsite decided that they probably wanted the team to be all senior level engineers so things were still up in the air. I then get another call from the recruiter saying that the team decided to move forward with putting together an offer at IC1 and they just need to get final approval from the CTO before sending it over. Next afternoon I get a call saying that the CTO does not have the framework to hire any new IC1s to be remote, at least for the next 6-12 months. Seems more likely to me that the team changed their mind again (as I doubt Compass is still unable to figure out how to support new IC1s remotely after 6 months being remote).
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Compass (Bellevue, WA)
Interview
Pretty chill. Three rounds of debugging, technical (leetcode), and behavioral, which was more like high-level with AI assistance. The values did not come up very much while going through the interview process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Had us do an AI round about forms and matching things.
Debugging, technical, then behavioral. I had been given two language options for the debugging portion (Java or Python) during the phone interview then when I went to the onsite there seemed to be a miscommunication because the interview said I could use JS since I was applying as a frontend engineer. The debugging was pretty doable, the behavioral was odd but fine.
The interview process felt chaotic and poorly organized. What I was asked in the interview didn’t align with what HR told me to expect, and the interview started late. The lack of alignment between HR and the interviewer made it feel like the company overall may be chaotic. Afterward, HR’s follow-ups were generic and robotic, and the employer also mentioned layoffs, which added to the uncertainty. Overall, it didn’t feel worth the effort.