I applied for a Senior Engineer position through Cord, where the advertised tech stack included Python and Rust. During my initial screening with the recruiter, I made it clear that I had no Rust experience, only Python. She assured me this wasn’t a problem and that the focus would be on Python.
After about a week, I was invited to a first-stage interview, but on the day of the interview, I received a message saying it was canceled and rescheduled for a few days later. This was frustrating, as I had to cancel another interview to accommodate theirs.
During the interview, I was given a live coding challenge where I had to create a simple endpoint to fetch and sort data from the Star Wars API. I completed the task quickly, wrote unit tests, and even had time left for questions. Despite my concerns about the poor quality of their public GitHub repository (which lacked formatting, linting, and docstrings), I was reassured when they claimed to use modern Python tools internally for code quality.
The following Monday, the recruiter informed me they had moved forward with another candidate who had more Rust experience. This was a huge disappointment, especially since I had been upfront about my lack of Rust experience from the start. It felt like they wasted my time when they could have ruled me out early on based on this requirement.
Looking back, I can’t help but feel that the initial interview cancellation may have been to accommodate the other candidate with Rust experience. If so, it speaks volumes about their lack of respect for candidates' time. I’m looking for a serious job opportunity, not to have my time wasted by disorganized companies that can’t communicate their priorities upfront.
