The whole process seemed like a waste of time. When the recruiter initially reached out to me they mentioned that they already had other candidates that passed the first round. Knowing this they scheduled out my first round 3 weeks later. I was really confused by this and emailed to clarify if we were still in alignment since others are further along in the process. They said it was fine since team is slowing down for the holidays. They closed the role the day before my interview. What was the point in stringing me along like that?

I had a weird interview experience with Toast. Unlike big techs, seems like they follow a yes/no binary template where you are expected to say the exact thing that have in their checklist rather than evaluating candidate’s problem solving, leadership, architecture skills. For example, they don’t care about the code logic, they just want a running code. They don’t care about the optimal system design solution, they want an exact SQL query. May be that is working out for them but that kind of yes/no interview style makes more luck dependent than actual skill evaluation. Good thing is that the recruiter gave a transparent feedback.

It was a screening round and a full four-round interview. I admin that I didn't do well on the system design round, but giving me a feedback that I didn't ask clarifying questions (after I commented and discussed avery single word I wrote in my solutions) and that my knowledge of specific technologies is not deep enough (after I solved the problem within first 10 minutes of the interview and then explained what I would improve further) was absolutely generic. I suspect someone just didn't like me (which is fine, and they should've'been frank about it). Also a lot of behavioural stuff, alomost as much as you get at Amazon. The interviewing Director wasn't a pleasant person, who seemed absolutely disinterested in listening my honest answers but was focused on rushing through a list of the prepared questions. Additionally, the company people missed several my emails and didn't turn up on two of the booked sessions, which was, as I understand now, a red flag. I'll not apply anymore.