Disorganized and unprofessional towards candidates.
0. Contacted by recruiter who saw me on Hacker News.
1. Initial call with said recruiter who, in her words, wanted to make sure I was a "real human." Um, okay.
2. Call with CTO. Went well, nothing too technical. According to him, it was possible for me to get an offer within a week, setting timeline and communication latency expectations, which couldn't have been further from the truth.
3. Touch-base email with recruiter who, despite me expressing that was interested in a backend role, asks me to interview for both SRE and a backend role. Recruiter CC's next two "Senior" engineers to interview me, calls me by the wrong name "Mohammad" and fubs the interview order, all in 1-2 emails. I'm gracious about it, but internally laughing out loud.
4. I get a Calendly link to book a slot to discuss my take-home assignment. It was a simple JSON REST API written in Go. The only interesting part was the choice of data storage format and automating the test and database migrations (which I'd done before, so this was all reasonably fast).
4. Schedule a meeting with Engineer 1 to discuss take-home. I wake up early; they never showed. Later I found out it was a company holiday and the booking software they use doesn't account for that, allowing me to schedule an interview anyway. The interviewer auto-accepted the calendar invite.
5. Finally, my take-home assignment discussion is scheduled. I spent most of the time answering questions from the interviewer about what it was like to work at FAANG. I get the sense they'd never read my code and just ran it through AI. There was a coding portion that was a trivial extension of the take-home problem. Interviewer says I should hear back from the recruiter in a day or two.
6. Despite that, over a week later, I finally get a response from the recruiter saying they want me to take the SRE interview as well. I was literally writing my candidacy withdrawal e-mail when I received this request, but decide to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I'd learn something.
7. Schedule SRE interview with a Senior DevOps guy, who's only ever worked here after graduating college.
8. Solve some trivial Kubernetes debugging and Helm setup problems in real-time, with time to spare. Spend remaining time talking about their stack. Try to express enthusiasm. This interviewer accurately mentions it might be weeks till I hear back again (lol). I also get a demo of what their AWS console looks like, which I'm pretty sure wasn't a good security posture.
9. Weeks later, a random e-mail from the CEO asking when I'd be ready to work. I answer.
10. Weeks pass with no further follow-up.
I think the entire process just how disorganized and uncaring of candidates' time this company is - and they contacted me! Throughout the process and from employee reviews, I'd expect that they pay pretty poorly as well.
