CK recruiter reached out to me initially for an engineering opportunity. Informational interview lasted around 15 minutes. Next round was a ~45min technical challenge using CoderPad with a senior engineer. The problem itself wasn't tricky at all, just general use of array/string/etc methods and manipulation. I personally did not do well this round, but was invited to an onsite regardless. Now here's the interesting part, my recruiter gave me the option of directly attending the onsite... HOWEVER, I would have to pay for my own flight + hotel because of my poor CoderPad assessment) or I would have to retake the CoderPad challenge for a reassessment. Never heard of paying for my own flight + hotel for an interview before... quite ridiculous if you ask me. I ended up retaking the CoderPad challenge and got my flight + hotel fee covered. The only downside to this was slowing down the interview process. Onsite interview was ~4 hours which consisted of two coding challenges, one design challenge, and behavioral/experience interview. Personally, I was feeling very nervous and couldn't shake it off. Unfortunately, there's no warmup round so you gotta be on top of your game. With that said... First round was with a senior engineer which consisted of coding a mockup using React. For some reason it didn't feel like a relaxed environment or I wasn't able to click with my interviewer; it just felt tense the entire time, as if I was eating up his time. With that said, I'm generally good with React, but I definitely choked this round (which should have been my best round). I use VS Code as my text editor so I had all my code snippets, shortcuts, and plugins ready to go to speed development. However, he suggested we use his (old?) laptop, which felt a bit clunky. He used Atom as his text editor with default setup, so I felt a bit uncomfortable developing. Welp, no excuses I guess. There were a lot of things I did that made me look like a junior developer, and I didn't know why I did them to be honest (i.e. not fully utilizing Chrome devtools). There were times I wasn't asking for help, but I was interrupted multiple times as he assumed I needed help and physically took over and did some of the code for me with his approach. I was a bit irritated by all of this; I felt like if I didn't ask for help at all, he would have let me continue work rather than make me lose my focus every so often. All of this kept lingering through the back of my head for the rest of the interviews. YIKES. Second round was with a senior engineer which was about OOP/ES6. Now, this round was kicked off with learning each other's background and it definitely made me feel at ease instantly. After a few exchanges, we immediately went straight to whiteboarding. I can't give away too much, but let's just say I didn't understand the question and it led to another bad round for me. Similar to the previous round, there were a few times I was interrupted while I was in the middle of whiteboarding and it just threw me off of my flow. Third round was with a senior engineer and another engineer shadowing him. Both were very nice and also made me feel at ease. This involved whiteboarding a base UI and constantly adding edge cases to improve it. I thought I did extremely well this round as I was receiving very positive and engaging feedback from the senior developer. This is what my first round should have been. Last round was with the hiring manager. Lots of talks with previous experiences and working across teams. I believe I asked questions that sparked extreme interest with the hiring manager that we kept talking non-stop. Thought that went very well. After a week, I was emailed that I didn't get an offer. I expected it and knew where I messed up. If given the chance to do the onsite over again, I would. What's great is that they ask questions relevant to the role or your past experiences and nothing out of the ordinary. TL;DR: - Wasted lots of time with the CoderPad interview and recruiter gave me option to pay for my own travel expenses for onsite interview. lol wut? Redid interview for covered travel expenses instead. - I choked the first onsite round and wasn't used to the laptop given. Should have done better. Felt awkward with interviewer. - Didn't understand the second round, so that's my fault. Nervousness slowly disappearing this round. - Did extremely well on the design portion. Wasn't nervous at all at this point. - Had a thoughtful/meaningful conversation with the hiring manager.