I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at HubSpot (New Orleans, LA) in Oct 2024
Interview
They are very proud of their fully automated process for the first step of the interview and even separately blogged about it. They were sure their approach was less stressful and would avoid false negatives. They talked about making API calls and in between processing some information and that I should understand JSON and basic data structures.
After 2 days of preparing myself for what I thought could be involved in the actual assessment, I felt confident that I could handle whatever the problem with speed and grace. I've also been doing dozens of HackerRank problems for weeks and I was excited about the prospects of working at HubSpot in the future.
When I started the assessment, I realized pretty quickly that the entire thing was designed to be a false negative to prevent the need for actual human interaction with candidates due to the 3 hour time limit and the complexity of the actual problem to solve. Instead of determining engineering skill or problem solving skills, they had essentially created a problem to solve that only identifies people that have literally bumped into this exact problem, Googled their interview ahead of time, and had knowledge of the obscure data structures required to solve it with an implementation already prepared.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Solve this problem in 3 hours using a long write up about it, with information about CORS that would have been good to know ahead of time.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at HubSpot (London, England) in Oct 2024
Interview
I aced my interviews but still did not get an offer. They are interviewing just for the sake of showing the world that they are hiring. I am pretty sure they are not hiring. The job I applied to was reposted on LinkedIn before I finished my interviews. I was well prepared for the interviews, I have worked on low-latency distributed systems at FAANG for 5+ years. I was interviewing at Hubspot just to practice my system design skills. I was well aware that Hubspot could not match my TC. They still rejected me saying the bar is really "high". The bar at Hubspot is pretty low. They have been asking the same system design and coding questions in the last 3 years.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Screening - 3 hour coding challenge which I aced in 40 mins.
2. System desing round 1 - Design Netflix [Search a video, play a video, resume a video, recommendations from watch history, multiple users using same account problem]
3. Coding - Merge two sorted lists
4. System design round 2 - Design an API of a weather app to support 2K zipcodes in the US. Assume you are fetching data from an external website like nsw.com for your weather app.
Technical screening project had a fatal flaw. I got it working with the API response described via logging, but it rejected the answer and did not say why. Interview process would not move on without passing.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Asked me to write a server that took an input and provided a response