I was initially contacted about the position by a headhunter who after a brief discussion said he would submit my information for the position. About a week later I followed up with him on the phone to check on the status and he was rather rude with me and ultimately hung up on me. Some of that may have been a cultural issue as he was clearly not native born, and English obviously was not his first language. After that, still being interested in the opportunity I went and applied directly through Rackspace's online job website. A week or so later I received a call from one of Rackspace's internal recruiters for an initial phone screen which was painless and went well. Then a 1:1 phone interview was arranged the following week with the hiring manager who would ultimately be my boss in this position. Again, this was a relatively painless interview, mostly conversational talking through some of my background and experience. Another phone interview was scheduled for a few days later, this time with two developers who would be colleagues working on the same development team. Again, this interview was mostly conversational discussing my background and experience, and they informed me at the end of the call that I would definitely be moving on to the next step. They were not clear whether that would be another phone interview or video chat, or if it would be in person. As it turned out, the next step was in fact to schedule a day of in person panel interviews. I received an email from a coordinator regarding scheduling of that interview asking as to my availability on a specific date. Being fully employed currently I immediately put in a request for time off for that date, after which I was notified that there had been a scheduling conflict and all of the people I was slated to meet with would be out off the office that week, and could I come the following Monday instead. Perhaps I should have taken that as a sign of things to come... After a bit of frustration I was able to arrange to take time off the following week instead, and then proceeded to wait several weeks for that date to arrive. They flew me directly into San Antonio on Sunday the day before my interview, and put me up in the Courtyard Marriott. There was nothing exceptional about the hotel, but I have certainly stayed in worse places, so I had no complaints. Aside from the frustration around the original scheduling issue for this full day of panel interviews I was still feeling very positive about the opportunity. I spent the evening in my hotel room preparing for the following day, and caught a shuttle over to Rackspace in the morning. There were two other people in the shuttle from the hotel to Rackspace for interviews. I didn't talk to them much, but from what I could discern they weren't interviewing for the same position. I walked into the first interview feeling confident, as I was a perfect match for the position based on the job posting. I have interviewed other places where I can tick off many of the qualifications but not all and still come away from the interviews with a solid offer; in this case I was able to tick off every item on the list of qualifications including all of the nice to haves. The panel interviews consisted of five one-hour slots. Each of the first four rounds of interviews consisted of myself and two interviewers, with the final interview consisting of just myself and the hiring manager. The interviews were largely conversational, nothing terribly in depth or probing with regard to any hard technical skills. There were perhaps one or two questions that were challenging, but overall I felt I handled all of the questions with relative ease and left feeling very positive about the entire experience. As I was being walked out by the hiring manager he explained that the panels would all meet the following morning to compare notes and I would likely hear something the following afternoon. Then I rushed off to catch my return flight home which was fairly tightly scheduled for about an hour after the scheduled end time for my final interview of the day. That was unfortunate as wrapping up that interview felt a bit rushed and disjointed. I did not receive a call the following day, or the day after that. Three days later, just at the end of the business day, I received a call with an offer.

I had a screening call followed by a 1-hour technical interview covering JavaScript, Angular, and Node.js fundamentals. Despite answering most questions well, I received a rejection email later that day without any specific feedback, which was disappointing.