I went through eight rounds of interviews at BLOCK. One round had to be rescheduled after a person on PTO was scheduled for one of my interviews (oops).

According to my recruiter, I passed the take-home code screening with great feedback and was therefore moved ahead to the virtual on-site, which included 5-6 additional interviews.

After the interview process was completed, the recruiter told me I had great feedback for all interviews except the panel interview. I was told I was not technical enough, despite it not being a technical interview. This was quite confusing.

The panel interview featured soft questions like, "Tell me about a challenging issue you were not able to resolve." I described a technical issue that had other complications, including managerial decisions and the final say of my customer in the situation. I specifically chose this scenario to demonstrate that IT engineering doesn't just involve technical challenges and that this field frequently involves navigating more than just technology.

For good measure, I concluded my panel interview by discussing tainting in Terraform, a technical concept. It seems the interviewers were not familiar with the concept (a technical one), therefore the feedback that I was not technical enough was confusing.

I was told they were looking for a lead engineer for the role, which was never brought up during the entire process. Regardless, I have over 15 years in the industry, including three senior roles. One doesn't typically get this far without the technical chops.

The recruiter and I had a discussion in which I explained how the interview went, and I was told to give them 48 hours while they spoke with the hiring manager again. Five days later, I had to reach out again for the final decision: they could not move to an offer.

Yikes. Eight interviews, including a 1-2 programming assignment. What a waste of my and their staff's time.

Look at the job description. They aren't using tech like Kubernetes, containers, or Terraform, and even core AWS services were not mentioned. The JD talks about SaaS products like Okta, Zoom, and Slack. If you want to have a technical interview, ask technical questions. Don't just throw subjective questions.

Tell us about a challenging issue you could not resolve.