Initial contact, recruiter, onsite. Absolutely one of the worst experiences I have had recently.

Initial phone contact had to happen due to my initiative. I eventually spoke to a recruiter, but it was mostly just the same old canned conversation, and a pointless emphasis on Atlassian "Values," which were just the same drivel you see on any company site now.

First onsite interview was an architecture review where the interviewer asked me to design a system to process millions of messages only-once and synchronously. This is a hard problem. He kept nudging me toward a solution based on AWS SQS, which is, as stated in their own documentation, not only-once and definitely asynchronous. He just wouldn't budge. It really annoys me when the person on the other side of the table attempts to speak with authority and does not know even the basics of their subject matter. I wouldn't budge, and I was probably declined in his eyes right there. It was very frustrating to deal with someone who is like a dog holding onto its bone when they are just plain wrong.

Next interview was a decent discussion of their tech stack. A decent conversation, but no clear conclusion – just two guys talking.

Last interview was an algorithm question that was so obtuse and peculiar that you would only have answered it correctly if you had seen the question and answer written down somewhere and simply memorized it. Something to do with Fibonacci sequences and tree traversals. I couldn't even figure out what I would have proven had I had the answer memorized; it was intellectual obscurity.

We covered nothing in any interview about software maintenance, which you would think is important for a company with many codebases in production that are many years old.

We covered nothing about real software development.

After my onsite, I had a further video chat with an engineering director that was many days after the onsite and a waste of time on both sides, given that the developers I spoke to had probably already decided to pass on me.

I don't mind being declined by a company and have even recommended others apply to a company I have declined, but I would never recommend anyone touch Atlassian.

Design a distributed system to process millions of messages synchronously and only-once.