I only did a phone screen and a first round technical interview. I was clear the person on the phone screen had no clue what a software engineer is and would be doing, but just sort of just repeating words and phrases they’d been told to ask/look for. Ex. Kept asking about mutexes but my previous work was on parallelizing work and removing mutexes from the code base, which is harder to do. They only moved on only after I gave up and said “yes I’ve worked with mutexes”
J'ai postulé via un recruteur. J'ai passé un entretien chez MongoDB (Toronto, ON) en avr. 2026
Entretien
I interviewed with a employee from New York and during my coding round, I gave brute force and also optimized solution, wrote the code within first 20-30 mins. I felt like it stopped being about evaluating my solution and turned into him continuously changing the problem. I'd answer one question, then he'd introduce a new assumption that wasn't part of the original design.for example, assuming a bounded executor queue with blocking submit(), even though my solution was based on Java's standard ExecutorService.
It felt like he kept modifying the underlying behavior just to see where the solution would break instead of discussing the design I had actually written. I don't mind deep follow-up questions at all, but it became hard to know what I was supposed to optimize for because the assumptions kept changing. Interviewer I got, He'll keep drilling into concurrency and may intentionally change the rules of the system. I felt like he wanted me to fail lol. Hopefully you get a different and fair interviewer.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
How does ExecutorService limit concurrency? How would you make the visited set thread-safe?
J'ai postulé via un recruteur. J'ai passé un entretien chez MongoDB (Dublin, Dublin) en mars 2026
Entretien
Some behavioral questions and a rate limiter coding question with a staff engineer. They really wanted full proof code with no syntax errors and no interviewer guidance. Felt like the interviewer was not attentive.
Saw a fresh ad online, applied quickly and got a quick follow-up from recruiter. So far so good. Well, that's where it ends. After the recruiter call was scheduled, I got completely ghosted.