Tripadvisor Software Engineer I interview questions

The process isn't set for your success. First meeting with recruiter. Generic and common interview to superficially expose your experience and the position. This took some back and forth to schedule, I had to share my availability twice. Second interview with a technical member of the team. This was a MLOps position so we discuss my background both in Ops and ML. Conversation goes well until a technical assessment is mentioned. At no given moment during the previous chats/emails with the recruiter I was told there would be such assessment. Nevertheless I accept the task and try to show my thought process while solving the challenge. Ended the challenge proud as this was the first white board I was doing after several years in Ops work. However the interviewer reproached me claiming I didn't know the basics of Python. I feel I was penalized for sharing my thought process and questioning the name of libraries (things I could google for). I still fail to see the relevance of such task for the position. Probably could have done better if prepared. My fault I didn't ask the recruiter what would be the next step. Preparing the candidate is key for such challenges, that's where other companies running white board tests succeed and Tripadvisor fails.

Initial quick chat with recruiter. Hiring Manager round: some technical questions + behaviour questions + a leetcode easy on coderpad. 4 rounds of interviews with engineers: 1) some bqs + technical questions + leetcode medium 2) some bqs + technical questions + leetcode medium 3) some bqs + technical questions + OOD design 4) some bqs + paired programming + technical questions All the people I spoke with were friendly and nice. Questions asked were fair but I didn't do well in 2 of the final rounds. I was ghosted for a month after the final rounds with multiple emails being ignored. Recruiter reached out a month later, apologized and provided some good feedback. I would say overall it was a good interview process where I was able to identify some areas of improvements. I don't like being ghosted and I suggest to give candidates some sort of updates like "we need more time to make a decision" or simply "you're rejected".