LiveRamp

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LiveRamp in July 2014.

Interview

I was approached by a recruiter who connected me with the company. I wasn't asked to finish the coding challenge because I have one year of industry experience.

There were two rounds of phone interviews. The first one was with an engineer. I was told the interview would last for an hour and was expecting the same questions listed in the other posts here. But I was completely wrong. First of all, he was 10 mins late. He only asked a few probability questions and some brain teasers. And after 25 mins, he called it over. I was shocked that a software company would ever do interviews like this. Considering the time they spent on me and the joking questions asked, I was quite surprised that they would like to proceed with a second interview with the VP of Engineering. Again, similar experience in the second interview but for the record, I think the VP is a nice and easy going guy. I was invited to onsite interviews one day after the second phone interview.

Then came the bad impression.

There were 4 rounds of interviews(2 engineers for 3 rounds plus 1 round of VP of Engineering). After that I was asked to do a quick presentation. I met 6 engineers in total and 5 of them were in the company when Liveramp was still part of Rapleaf.

The first two guys were nice. I solved the problems fast and had good communications with them. Then came the second round. One of the engineers joined a couple of years ago and I figured he was able to communicate. The other guy looked fine at the beginning. However, after I nailed the coding question with less than 15 lines of code, he could not be convinced until the end of round. I was pretty sure about the solution since I've written the same code for at least ten times and the solution passed all online judge systems across the web. All the guy did was lying in his chair making weird sound with the candy in his mouth and saying 'I don't think it's right.' From then on, I started to regret coming in for onsite interviews.

The third round was with the VP of Engineering. He was a nice dude, I have to say. The programming question was easy and he was more interested in the memory issue of the problem.

The fourth round was with two more engineers after lunch. Please excuse the expression but I can't find a better word other than 'terrible' to describe them. First of all, they looked tired, and cold. They seemed not willing to talk at all. I was talking and smiling all the time, and these guys were just sitting there staring straight at me with no emotions and intentions to talk. Given the fact that I pretty much figured that I don't wanna work with 3 out of the 6 engineers over there, I intended to screw the rest of the interview.

Overall, the company might looks fine. And I hoped most of the guys working there are nice dude, really collaborative. However, according to my experience, I really doubt it. Yes, you are some ok company which was acquired for 300M bucks by some old company. But that does not mean anything to me. If you wanna name yourselves tall just because of the acquisition, I don't really know what to say anymore. According to my interview experience, the 3 not-so-good guys were definitely not that good technical-wise. They gotta learn to get better understanding of their own questions and show at least minimum respect to interviewees.

I definitely do not recommend this company for experienced guys who are looking for a move. New grads are fine maybe, as long as being looked down upon by some no-so-good senior guys can be tolerated.

Interview Questions