Otter.ai Interview Questions
& Process

So I interviewed about a year ago, and it started with a recruiter call, and they were super nice. Then I had a coding interview for about 45 minutes with an engineer. The problem was like a LeetCode medium-hard about finding the shortest path between two islands in a grid. I did a BFS solution which worked, but then the interviewer wanted me to optimize. I was fine with that, and things were going well until I started coding the optimized solution. I swear I heard chess sounds in the background. I looked and the engineer was literally playing chess and not even paying attention. It was so disrespectful and frustrating. I mean, can you not pay attention for a 45-minute interview? That's not even enough time for that problem unless you've seen it before. Worst interview ever, I really hope that's not how this company operates.

I met with the head of recruiting over Zoom. It was a nice call where they asked excellent questions and shared details about my experience and the job requirements at Otter. The conversation was pleasant, and I even got a short product demo. Otter's tech seems really cool and has the potential to help many businesses. However, I only received a brief email a few weeks later saying my profile was forwarded to the hiring manager, and then nothing. It's ironic that a company focused on productivity and engagement can't even send a rejection email. It feels like they ghosted me.

I had a really good experience interviewing at Otter.ai. A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, and I was already interviewing elsewhere. At Otter, I spoke with a tech lead, a Director from a partner team, two software engineers, and the CTO. The coding parts were pretty typical, but the vibe was super friendly and chatty. The interviewers seemed down-to-earth and genuinely stoked about working there, which was nice. I took Otter's offer because it was a good package and the role was pretty key. I'm feeling good about this company's growth.

I first chatted with a recruiter I found on LinkedIn for about 15-20 minutes, discussing my projects. Then, I was sent a HackerRank assessment with two coding questions and some multiple-choice questions about cloud and web systems. The coding questions involved a LeetCode easy problem and another that required using the Python requests module to interact with an API. Following that, I had a coding interview with an engineer. During the interview, the engineer repeatedly questioned my degree not being in computer science, despite my relevant project experience. He also incorrectly assessed my code's functionality, focusing on perceived design flaws that weren't present. The coding question asked was not directly related to backend development; it was about finding the K largest elements in a list. He first asked about different implementation methods and their complexities, then instructed me to implement the brute force solution without using Python's built-in sort() function.