Xoom Interview Questions
& Process

I had a phone screen with the hiring manager. He was from South America and one of the most awkward people I've ever interviewed with. Two things stood out from this experience. First, he spent at least 20 of the scheduled 30 minutes talking about the company. I already knew everything he was telling me from my research and familiarity with the industry. While I'm okay with that, it was a semi red flag that he was taking up all the time when he should be vetting me. He did graciously ask if we could go over, and we ended up going an hour. Second, he had me go over an example from my past but got so hung up on my pronouns. I understand you want to know what I specifically did versus the team/others, but at least let me finish the story. He must've interrupted me at least 7 times to start over. I was soooooooo close to just hanging up, and I've NEVER been that close to doing so. Plus, it's just rude. I don't know if it was his English skills, perhaps? (I'm a minority myself). In the 75 or so interviews I've done and recounts of my professional experiences, I've never encountered anything close to this experience on this one question, which took up at least 20 minutes. The nail in the coffin regarding red flags regarding JUST THIS MANAGER (I still love the concept of Xoom) is that I asked him what is the one thing he'd change at Xoom. He stated 'absolutely nothing.' Perhaps I should've phrased it differently, but in the 75-ish interviews I've ever done in my life, no one has ever said 'absolutely nothing.' I found it to be naive and/or foolish. I called HR and told them I want to withdraw from the search regardless of evaluation.

It was a phone interview. Right on time, one of the engineers called me and we started talking. After they asked the usual stuff like 'tell me about yourself' and about my background, they gave me a program about perfect numbers and asked me to find bugs, improve the code, and fix Java styles. Then they asked some follow-up questions about OOPS principles, like which principle I used to make the design better. They also asked about the static keyword and where to use it, how to do multiple inheritance without interfaces in Java, and about the builder pattern. There were also other normal questions about how long I've used Java, Spring, etc.

So there were 2 rounds total. The first was a technical round for about an hour, and the task was to implement a data structure from scratch. Like, they asked me to implement a stack from scratch. The other round was also an hour long and focused on design. It involved coming up with an algorithm to make a day-to-day thing perform better.

I had read that several people thought the interview process was overly lengthy or difficult, I must disagree. Yes it was 3+ hours, but considering the size of the company and the fact that you get interviewed by several leaders of various teams I didn't consider it unreasonable at all, plus they hooked me up with snacks :)