Virtual Onsite for Frontend Interview At Zillow

the team I interviewed with is 3D home, because the content I previously worked on was somewhat related, so I casually applied. Then I looked up interview experiences online, and almost all of them were algorithm questions. So, I prepared for LeetCode-style questions.

During the interview, the interviewer was 8 minutes late, then said sorry, my computer just crashed, let’s chat for a bit first. So we awkwardly chatted about past experiences, what we have done, and so on. Asked a few React-related questions, like what aspects of React do you like, what aspects don’t you like (this question is too broad).

At this point, I was completely lost because I had never encountered this issue in my previous work. Well, I did have some pagination-related work before, but it wasn’t done by me… I regret not at least looking at the code to get a general idea. Weakly asked for some hints, and the interviewer said, “Hmm, this problem is one of the headaches we’ve encountered recently…” Me: …

In the last 10 minutes, I asked some questions related to the hiring team, but the other person, who was actually from a different team, didn’t know much. Turns out, he came over from another team just to help with the interviews, praised the team a bit, saying they do fun stuff, “I wish I could do something fun like that.” Me: … Are you saying you want to switch over yourself?

Anyway, being asked such an open-ended chat question in my first phone interview was quite surprising. I had no idea if I hit the mark throughout. Anyway, I already have an offer in hand, so I’ll just treat this as a fun experience…