Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Pinterest with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 43% positive. To compare, the company-average is 49.3% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 20 days to get hired, when considering 117 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Pinterest overall takes an average of 24 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Pinterest as a Software Engineer according to 117 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 44%
One on one interview: 22%
Skills test: 13%
Presentation: 7%
Group panel interview: 6%
Personality test: 2%
Drug test: 2%
Background check: 1%
Other: 1%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Pinterest (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2018
Interview
Recruiter emails multiple times asking for interviewing with pinterest.
It a very a worst interview expereince I just had ever in my life. It was a 1 hour technical phone screen. Here are the things I found with my interview expereince:
1.Firstly the interviewer called me late by around 10 mins, following time or apologizing if you are late is expected to be a good manners. which interviewer did not do.
2.When I started with a solution he again changed the problem to prove my solution was wrong and not scalable (Come on where do you find a scaling sudoku) .
3.I made a mistake in computing complexity (come on Interviews are never stress free) by this time he made up my mind that I am a bad engineer and started to criticize all points I made in the discussion. Instead helping me out or working with me. From this point on wards he kept on pointing faults in my solution. You can not judge a person based on one mistake. People do make mistake no one is perfect all the time.
4.He kept on changing the problem trying to prove my solution wrong or inefficient all the time.
I don't know what he was expecting out of the interview, I did not write a single line of code. It was not pleasure interviewing with pinterest, the interviewer's attitude was really bad. The interviewer said it is not working out and dropped the call in 30 mins, It sounded very rude to me.
Surprisingly easy compared to what I expected from a company like Pinterest. The technical interview consisted of two coding questions, one about reconstructing routes from unordered travel tickets and another on implementing a Sparse Matrix class. Honestly, I felt a bit underwhelmed. What helped me most in prep was studying the case studies on PracHub, which gave me good frameworks to think through problems. I did get an offer, but I ultimately declined because I was looking for a more challenging environment.
Recruiter call, tech round, onsite and rejection call. They sent me an email about a week after the last onsite and asked me to schedule a call on the same day. I scheduled a call to listen 30 second long rejection notice. A half of interview rounds were horrible. Interviewers were not prepared and arrogant.
1st round technical phone screening with in 1 hour.
One follow up question was asked.
The problem was not too hard, but it requires you finish really fast without bugs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode 1564. Put Boxes Into the Warehouse I.
Follow up: what is maximum total box sizes.