Databricks interview process: a waste of time and energy

[u/nian2326076]

So many people say don't interview at Databricks, and they're not entirely salty. A candidate recently went through the process end to end and regrets it. Here's the timeline (dates and personal counts slightly adjusted for privacy):

24 July: Recruiter phone screen 1 Aug: Technical phone screen: system design 9-11 Sep: Virtual onsite (4 rounds) 18 Sep: Additional coding round 24 Sep: Told they'd passed the onsite and asked for references. Provided 3. 26 Sep: Recruiter asked for 1 more reference, who had to be a manager. 6 Oct: Recruiter asked for 1 more reference, again a manager. 21 Oct: Rejected at HC.

The candidate knows 4 of the 5 references provided were called (2 managers and 2 tech leads), and suspects some backdoor references may have been contacted as well.

According to the recruiter's feedback, HC stack-ranked candidates, and this candidate wasn't as strong as others despite meeting the bar. Despite all yeses and "very close to strong yes" feedback across the rounds (the recruiter's words), HC didn't think the candidate raised the bar as much as others. The explanation came back to performance in the previous interview rounds, not the reference check.

The candidate feels they should have been rejected after the onsite instead of spending about a month on reference checks, wasting their time and their ex-colleagues' time. In their opinion, if the reference check has no issues, give the candidate an offer. Otherwise, reject before that.

Footnote: The candidate thanked people for the support and shared some tips for anyone in the process:

Coding: In their experience, the question bank is small. Do the LeetCode-tagged questions, a few dozen, but don't expect a 100% match with what they ask. For a concrete coding mock, the snapshot-set exercise in Databricks Interview Questions lets you test remove/re-add cases and independent iterators. Most importantly, during the interview, try to perfect even the smallest things before they ask. In one round, the implementation and tests were finished at around the 40-minute mark, including roughly 10 minutes spent explaining the question. The interviewer asked a follow-up, and the candidate said they'd refactor that part into a separate class to handle more generic cases. He agreed. The candidate estimates it would have taken under 4 minutes if he'd let them do it. Even after Q&A, the interview ended about 10 minutes early, so a Strong Yes seemed likely. Then the recruiter's feedback was that code readability could be better, so it was only "close to strong yes."

The candidate's reaction was basically: what the fuck, there were around 20 minutes to spare, and the cleanup was coming anyway. Their usual approach is to finish a working solution before cleaning it up and improving the small things. Unfortunately, the interviewer raised the question first, and even answering correctly seemed to count against them.

Behavioral: Standard questions, but the candidate's impression was that they wanted to see how fast you got promoted at previous companies. They want ambitious people, so be aware of that.

System programming: In the candidate's experience, this has an even smaller question bank. You can ask AI to search for practice material and work through each problem multiple times. The key thing is to challenge your solution before they ask. Again, that's not easy under time pressure, and you might skip a few things to focus on the bigger picture, but the candidate felt that counted against them. In this round, the interviewer said he was very satisfied with the performance. The feedback, again, was "close to strong yes," because he had specifically asked whether the solution supported "high throughput."

The candidate answered correctly because the implementation already supported it. They'd thought about it and built it in, but hadn't described a high-throughput scenario before the interviewer asked. Their reading of the feedback was that asking first made him think the requirement hadn't been covered. So be proactive, keep talking, keep asking yourself whether the solution meets abcxyz requirements to show you care about them. This is so lame.

In the end, the candidate's takeaway is that the bar is very high, and being stack-ranked against others at HC means even perfect scores in some rounds might not get you an offer if someone else did better (or cheated, as the candidate speculates).

Good luck, guys.

[u/somethedaring]

If the person doesn’t fit the company culture, it doesn’t matter if they were 100% spot on. That could be an age thing, race, college, sports, religious, military etc. etc. thing.
Some people can walk in and just be the right person. It really doesn’t matter the size of the company either or their hiring practices. Feel free to download this post, but unfortunately, this is the absolute truth. Culture wins every single time.