I applied in October and the process was straightforward but a bit slow and disorganized. The interview was 5 rounds: 1. Introduction interview where I talked with one of the team members about my projects at a high level 2. Technical interview I: Reverse complement of a DNA strand in place 3. Technical interview II: Leetcode merge intervals medium problem. 4. Cultural fit interview with two individuals 5. Meeting with principal and manager The reason why I think it was disorganized is because the person who I interviewed with for the first round was also in the 4th interview. He was confused as to why he was there in the first place. Secondly, the third person who was supposed to be in that interview was on vacation. It was a sign that HR was not really coordinating well with the team members. I passed all 5 rounds and a week later I received a rejection from HR saying a one sentence reply that they went with a candidate with more tailored experience. A few months went by and I was reached out by a different HR. I applied to the same exact position and notified him that I already applied back in October but was rejected because I didn’t have the exact experience they were looking for. He scheduled an interview with me and we had a short screening. He told me that the team wished to re-interview. I was interviewed for a technical problem again, which was: create two classes with 5 methods in each class. I passed this assessment and we scheduled a final interview with the principal and a senior software engineer. This is where it gets a bit weird… the first thing the senior software starts off the interview with was “you applied already and didn’t get it last time. So why did you apply again?” He asked me about my projects and it felt kind of like a grilling session. When I answered a question correctly, he would go deeper into it to an extent where I thought it was extremely irrelevant or from coursework from a year ago. It felt like more of a test of what I remembered from class, rather than what I can bring to the table as an employee. “What’s your experience with hardware?” (strange question since the job posting did not mention anything about hardware as this is a software role) “You never built a computer?” (after telling him I don't have any hardware experience other than taking apart my computer, he asked if I ever built one) “How much memory did it have?” “what’s the difference between UDP and TCP in network programming?” (again, not sure why he asked this when this is a SDE role and not an IT role) I told him the two types of network protocols from what I remembered from my courses. I told him the definitions but could not remember which one was which, so I asked him “can you remind me or help me match the definition to the protocol?” to which he said “oh, I actually don’t know”. This moment made me think that he was terribly unprepared for this interview and asked everything and anything that he thought of... even questions he didn't know the answers to. -“whats the difference between https and http?” To which I said “https is secured while http is not” and he followed up with “well WHAT in the ‘s’ makes it secured?”. I said “it has to do with encryption, but I’m not sure how it’s encrypted” - to which he sighed. Lastly, the principal asked me why my team decided to choose MySQL as opposed to NoSQL for my internship project. I told him that it aligned with our project requirements and we chose it because we needed multiple tables with relationship between them. And he said “Nono, stop using business terms. You don’t sound like you know why you guys chose MySQL. What’s the difference between MySQL and NoSQL?” I told him that MySQL is comparable to an excel table, while NoSQL stores collections in a key value type of relationship. So he continued and asked “ok that's correct, so why did you choose MySQL?” To which I said “we were comfortable using it and decided it was best for this project” and he said “okay so you only chose it cause you don’t know how to use NoSQL, OK. understood” I got the rejection a week later from HR saying they hired someone with more experience…. Again. Another thing I did notice though, was that, of the 7 team members on the team that I interviewed with, 6 were Asian. I seriously feel like they might have some diversity issues or bias toward one ethnicity after looking through their other reviews.