The interview process consisted of a 1 hour conversation with a technical recruiter to understand my background and whether or not my experience matched what they were looking for. The second portion was a phone screen requiring a live-coding build of a weather API that needed to be matched to a spec. Finally, they invited me to an in-person interview that lasted 7 hours with 4 technical coding challenges, a culture fit interview, manager interview, and team lead interview, each lasting an hour long. I was never told what specific team I was interviewing for until I got there.
The phone screen went very well, the interviewer was responsive, kind, helpful and made me feel at ease. After the phone screen, they got back to me within 24 hours to let me know that they were moving me to the next steps. I was looking forward to my in-person interview because of how kind that interviewer had been, however I was very wrong.
The in-person interview was horrible, disappointing, and discouraging. Nearly every interviewer showed up late, and one didn't even bother to show up at all so they had to quickly find a replacement cutting into my interview time.
For my lunch interview, the food was awesome, but the interviewer was on his phone the entire time and didn't ask me a single question. I had to carry the entire interview asking him questions in between the time he checked his phone. He clearly had other things on his mind.
The hiring manager didn't ask me a single question because it was 'my opportunity to ask questions.' However he made it clear that he wanted to be doing other things and made me incredibly uncomfortable because our conversation wasn't natural, it was one-sided and it's hard to talk to someone that doesn't talk back to you without feeling like you're rambling.
For one coding question, the interviewer wasn't even watching me code which was obvious when I asked a question about how to proceed and was told 'hang on, let me go back to the code' so I'm not sure how she gave me feedback when he wasn't paying attention.
The other technical interviewer was nice enough, but clearly not trained on the question. This person had never seen CSS grid before and was also unhelpful giving feedback during the question because I don't think this person understood the question themselves.
Another interviewer was great, other than making the comment that 'I just got back from vacation and am really tired and don't know if I'll be a good interviewer right now, but I'll do my best'. This was my best interview, the interviewer was helpful, responsive, professional, and kind, just tired. This was my favorite out of all of the interviews because the interviewer was present and helped engage in a dialogue.
The final technical interviewer didn't contribute much, this person just sat, watched me code, asked if I had any questions and left the room. He neglected to tell me that it was an open-book interview, so my performance could have improved.
The culture fit interview was extremely uncomfortable because neither interviewer made eye contact with me during the entire conversation because they were too busy trying to type every word I said. It's very difficult to talk to people that don't look at you. They also assumed they knew my answers by saying 'I think I know what you'll say because you touched on it before but I'll let you answer anyway'.
The worst part was that I was only let go to the bathroom once in 7 hours and I was never offered water, except for at lunch. Their treatment of humans is inhumane and I didn't appreciate how disrespectful they were, especially for a company that promotes and encourages diversity and fair treatment of people. Their on-site interview was one of the most exhausting things I've ever done in my entire life.
I sent a thank you but didn't hear back until I reached out to the recruiter a couple of weeks after the interview. I was rejected me in an unprofessional, short email that didn't use proper grammar or punctuation. I was offered feedback, but when I tried to schedule a time to hear the feedback, they never responded. If you don't want to give people feedback, don't offer.
I know other people that have had positive interview experiences with Dropbox, however I'll never apply there again because I have such a negative impression of their company culture and how they disregard people. Their interview process was over 10 hours total and the treated me like I was a burden to them when in reality they were being paid to interview me, I wasn't being paid or treated well to interview with them.
I don't think my experience is representative of every interview at Dropbox, they make a good product and must have good people working on it. However the team that I interviewed for was terrible so if you're not interviewing for a web dev position, you'll probably have a better experience.
