Comment by mercy_dude

I recently interviewed for Stripe for an SWE role. I went through what must be 3 rounds (each about an hr) before going to virtual on-site. My on-site had 5 rounds and I thought I did fairly well in each except one dedicated to a “live debugging” session where the interviewer insisted I install IntelliJ (me being a VIM person) and we spent roughly 30min together installing and setting up different things in IntelliJ.

Three days later I got one of those generic thank you for applying in Stripe emails. I reached out to the recruiter and asked for specific feedback and explained my interview experience but I heard nothing back.

I spent about 1.5days of my personal time off which at my current market rate is close to 1k USD. I sincerely believe we SWE should be paid to do the interviews at a prorated basis of their salaries or at least some level of expenses. With virtual on-site companies basically don’t have to do anything other than employing a few sourcers to hire potential candidates which incentivizes these sort of poor candidate experience.