New York Times Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

Don't bother unless you want to be treated like a number or guinea pig. The recruiters act like they care but end up ghosting you in the process. There is no closure. Very unprofessional. The first round is an easy leetcode problem. Then they ask you to describe a high level system design architecture. The second round of interviews involve a system design problem, coding review/debugging, and behaviorals and values. During the technical rounds, they ask a lot of curveball questions that end up changing the original problem they asked.

Applied via referral and heard back from a recruiter about a week later. The recruiter just read back the job description and said she'd pass it to the manager, expecting a response in a day or two. No response, so I followed up a week later with no reply. Three weeks after the initial call, the recruiter messaged thanking me for the call and asked for my availability to speak with the manager, without any apology. I provided my availability and had a call scheduled with the manager two days later. The manager seemed unprepared, pulling up my resume and thinking aloud about questions. When I explained my experience and tech stack, she argued about a specific tool's usage. She couldn't even discuss the tools her team uses. The 45-minute interview finished in under 30 minutes due to her lack of preparation and inability to ask more questions. Two days later, I received a rejection email from the recruiter; I wasn't interested in working for a manager like that anyway.

It all started with an unsolicited email from a recruiter, which I decided to follow up on. The whole process spanned over two months, but generally, it was a positive experience. First, there was a recruiter screen where my recruiter communicated very well and was always available, one of the best I encountered in my job search. Then, a technical phone screen was conducted where they presented a problem similar to a LeetCode easy, but it was more of a unique string manipulation task rather than a standard algorithm question. Interestingly, this screen had two interviewers. The subsequent on-site interviews balanced culture fit and technical skills about equally. There were two technical interviews: one for system design and one for coding. The coding interview involved straightforward LeetCode easy problems, which I completed efficiently. The system design interview was a bit challenging due to the interviewers being less interactive, leaving me to proceed with my design without much feedback. I felt I performed reasonably well, though I'm unsure if it met their expectations. The non-technical interviews were quite brief (30 minutes each) and focused on general job interview topics rather than engineering specifics, which was a bit unusual. A recurring observation was that every interview, technical or not, included at least two interviewers, which was a first for me and slightly distracting. I also noted the diversity within the engineering team, with a black engineer, a hispanic engineer, and multiple women engineers, which was a pleasant change. Despite the overall positive experience and my perceived performance, I didn't receive an offer, which was disappointing as the NYT seems like a great workplace. I'm uncertain about where I fell short, as no detailed feedback was provided.