This review covers the tech screening process only. I passed the coding stage (finished in about 15 minutes, all answers correct), but I was clearly nervous during the following questions after not being on the market for 7 years, so I was fully prepared to accept a rejection for that reason alone.
What surprised me was the content of the interview report. I am a senior engineer with 14 years of experience, all of it in OOP-heavy environments. When an SRE interviewer writes that I “don’t know what OOP is,” it is simply not credible. This goes beyond misunderstanding, it reads as personal bias.
During the Java Collections discussion, I mentioned a Queue among other data structures. In Java, a Queue is explicitly part of the Collections Framework and it is defined as a data structure in computer science as well. The interviewer replied that he “could argue on that,” which simply does not align with the reality of software development. This was not a difference in interpretation, it was a factual inaccuracy.
Another example: during the HTTP discussion, the interviewer asked which requests can be cached: GET or POST. I answered honestly that I don’t work with low-level caching specifics daily, but I would assume that GET requests are cacheable while POST requests are not. The interviewer disagreed. After the interview, I double-checked the specification: my assumption was correct. This again shows that the negative feedback was not based on technical accuracy. Based on this particular answer, the entire web section of the report was marked as insufficient knowledge.
There were other factual inaccuracies. During the problem-solving stage I repeated multiple times that I would grep the files for numbers. I was never asked to provide a sample command. As someone who explicitly mentioned extensive Linux experience at the start of the interview, I expected the interviewer to understand what “grep for numbers” means. Yet the report claims I “don’t know what a regexp is,” which is difficult to reconcile with the fact that grep literally relies on regular expressions. It is equally difficult to believe that an SRE would not know this.
After receiving the feedback email (which was very detailed, I genuinely appreciate the HR work on this), I replied saying that I fully accept not passing due to a few vague answers caused by nerves, but I asked them to look into the objective inconsistencies in the regexp part of the report, because they clearly indicate some kind of issue. I was told that “TripAdvisor employees are extremely competent” and that I should try again in six months. That response did not address this clear example of factual inaccuracies during the interview.
I have been in software development for 14 years. I recognize a sexist when I see one.
