The prescreening is quite fast. The recruiter asks general and simple questions to realize if you really know what you are applying for. They claim to be nerds themselves and they think it is cool. After that, they send you a C++ test to solve.

I applied to a senior tools engineer in Stockholm, then I got a feedback that my skills suits better an unannounced role in another team. My resume was passed to another team for a C++ developer role. This takes a month as it was in summer 2023. I had a 30 minutes online screening interview with hiring. During the interview I was asked for another meeting onsite for more technical talk and so the manager make sure that I'm the same person interviewing for the role (very strange reason). I went to the office for a 60 minutes interview which went very well, however I have been told that my skills are superior to the team leader and the hiring manager prefer to keep the leader in his position. I considered this answer as a rejection and the manager mentioned this is not a NO answer for hiring me but he will get back to the team. During the entire interview process I was the person who follows up the process which was strange to me. Then after a while, I was given a technical test (creating a http client and json parser for reading from given APIs). I smashed the assignment in short time and sent it back to the technical people. After a while of following up with them, they invited me to another onsite interview to discuss my solution which was fully in C++ 17 (They use C++ 14). I passed the interview and the guys were nice and we discussed very low C++ details. During a week to 10 days I was following up on the next step which was the final step (the grand father interview). I've been told by the hiring manager that there are other candidates in the process and he'd like to give them a chance to progress further before deciding the grand father interview for all of candidates. This was my second signal that I'll be rejected. Finally I got a rejection email and reached out to know the reason and I'd been told that the budget has an issue and they will proceed with someone. I have not asked for a specific salary :). Of course, this was a very unprofessional experience that I had and I regretted my time spent on the process. My advice to interviewer, if you feel your candidate is overqualified, then be specific and end the process early and don't waste their time.