I went through a lot of rounds, and the last one was a long one—about three hours. After finishing it, the recruiter gave me a verbal offer, and the next day they called me back to say they were revoking it, with some explanation that didn’t make much sense to me.
What really bothered me was the lack of transparency across the process. Up until that point, I didn’t feel like I was being given clear, consistent signals about what might change or what could derail things. So when the offer disappeared, it felt sudden and unprofessional.
> 1 year
Difficult Neutral San Jose, CA
My experience felt mostly like a series of technical challenges where the tempo was sometimes tense. I went into the loop expecting something straightforward, but one of the coding/problem-solving rounds was derailed by unclear communication. The interviewer described one expected output and then, as we went, it turned out the target was different from what they initially communicated, and that ate up a noticeable chunk of time before I could even settle into the right approach.
The core problem itself felt like it belonged more to deep algorithmic optimization than what I associate with frontend work—specifically a variation of a knapsack-style challenge that turned into dynamic programming once hints clarified the direction. Even after I saw the DP shape of it, the interviewer seemed locked into a single solution path and didn’t let me explore alternative approaches. I tried to adjust and even implemented a brute-force backtracking version as an alternative, but it didn’t get fully followed, which made the conversation feel more like a mismatch than a collaborative assessment.
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