OfferUp Interview Questions
& Process

The interview process was quick, as they needed to fill the position before the manager's maternity leave. I got along well with everyone I spoke to and felt I did great in the interviews. We were all excited for me to start. I accepted the job offer and was waiting for my official start date. However, less than a week later, the recruiter informed me they had to withdraw the offer due to massive layoffs. The role and the team I was supposed to join were impacted by these layoffs (even long-term employees who spoke highly of the company culture). It's frustrating because I wasted valuable job search time on a role that was eliminated. Management should have known about the impending layoffs and should not have continued hiring. This all happened within about two weeks, so they would have had knowledge of the situation. This was a poor business practice.

So I had this first interview with the engineering lead, then a technical interview where they asked me the same intro questions and talked about random stuff, and then gave me only 15 mins to do a Java exercise. It was like an easy LeetCode problem, but 15 mins is way too short. I got a partial solution and talked about the Big O N complexity, and they let me go to the next round. The next round was 4 more interviews: 2 technical, one with the manager, and another for cultural fit, making it 6 interviews in total. The manager interview was cool. He asked about my current job, the tech I use, my problem-solving methods, and projects I've finished – you know, actual engineer questions. The second coding interview was pretty much a repeat of the first. They spent the first half hour asking those pointless intro questions, leaving only about 20 mins to solve a Java problem. The task was to build a basic LinkedList class and merge two sorted lists. I tried recursion, but there was a small bug at the end, so it wasn't perfect, though the approach was solid. That little mistake got me rejected right away, and I didn't get to do the other interviews. Basically, they're after LeetCode coders, not really software engineers.

They had me do a 10-step process which spanned nearly 10 hours of my time during the work week, and they confirmed their hiring team decided to move 6 different people through the process all the way to the final round. This resulted in 5 angry people when they made their hiring decision considering how demanding their process was. The recruiter called me to say "the team debriefed...and they passed" that's all they said. "The team debriefed on you, and, they passed" ...this came a few days after the final round, after a 10-step process where I provided work samples to 6 different people at the company, and was told I was a competitive candidate with absolutely zero concerns about my background expressed throughout the process from beginning to end. The wrong people showed up to my interviews based on the provided schedule, which was a mistake/oversight by recruiting, and multiple interviewers were significantly late to the interviews. 0/10 would not recommend interviewing with OfferUp to anyone, unless you enjoy having your time wasted after a long/drawn out process, only to receive a phone call that "they passed on you" without a thank you. Arduous hiring process, not a single thank you for all the time spent interviewing for 10 hours plus work samples, and a very unattractive brand to be working for.

The interview process was really smooth. First round, recruiter asked all behavioral questions and then gave an introduction about the back-end team at OfferUp. It consisted of two technical phone interview rounds using coder pad. First round, I was presented a graph question which consisted of multiple cycles. I needed to find the total number of distinct cycles available in the graph. I applied recursion and wrote a DFS approach. Second round, I was given a String Manipulation problem from the HARD section of leetcode, popularly known as Word Ladder 2.