Final interview was remote over video with six people. The founder/CEO was vaping prominently, to the point that it was a sort of performance throughout the interview. Ironically I have no problem with that. In fact I use (vape) medical cannabis at least once a day myself. But I felt that he was prompting me for some kind of response that I could not discern.
The team were all extremely experienced and each politely asked me several tough technical questions. Unfortunately there was clearly some kind of us/them coolness thing going on that was, although totally inoffensive, clearly cohering around an age/culture experience that I do not share. I made sure to explain that I'd enumerated their technology stack and some of their tools and I'd installed them each on an aws instance and spent a couple days learning all of it. But I could tell that this somehow didn't matter.
After a week they emailed me and said that, although I did fine on the technical questions, I was not a good "culture fit". Very disappointing.
I'll just say, in all seriousness, if you have the deep technical skills required for managing WordPress at scale, get yourself a black, flat-brimmed baseball hat with an embroidered pot leaf and nail that video interview. I'll even go so far as to say that I can tell these guys would all be fun to work with. They're all nice guys, including the founder/CEO, as far as I can tell. And you'd learn a lot. But if you don't conform culturally, I think you will not get hired.
