Technical Architect - Global Privacy Office - HBS.

The entire process was very slow. It started at the end of September 2023 with my application.

The recruiter had their first call after two weeks.

Then, it took 1.5 months for the hiring manager to conduct a half-hour interview.

Following that, it took another 3.5 weeks to reach the product and stakeholder management round.

In that round, two people were supposed to be present, but only one arrived on time. The manager conducting the interview had progressed from a software engineer to a senior product manager in less than eight years, so it was evident he was still more technically inclined than focused on actual management.

Twenty minutes into the round, the other interviewer joined, which seemed to irk the first interviewer and disrupted the interview's flow. The first interviewer then spent the remaining 40 minutes interrupting me before I could finish a single sentence.

The interview shifted from stakeholder and product management to being asked to provide a solution to an edge case problem they were facing in the consent management field.

As my fellow architects can attest, forming a solution is a process and cannot be demanded on the spot. Furthermore, there are multiple solutions to a problem, and in a brainstorming session, you collaborate to arrive at a good solution aligned with the program/company's architectural processes.

However, I was being pressed to form a solution for a scenario that might occur less than 1% of the time. The interviewer simply wanted to validate a hypothesis, already had a solution in mind, and dismissed my options outright.

This negative experience with a pushy individual who did not allow free expression during the interview indicated that the managers lacked mature interpersonal skills and wasted time on edge cases, completely overlooking the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) – essentially retaining a developer mindset rather than focusing on delivering value. It taught me what not to do when conducting an interview.

Since then, the entire recruitment department has reverted to their favorite activity: ghosting, without informing me about the result.

Explain how you do stakeholder management.

If your cookie manager does not pick up your new cookie via its scan script, how can you solve this? Even if restarting the script does not pick it up, you cannot make a custom solution.

How do you form a solution? This was asked by the gentleman who showed up 20 minutes late to an interview and 2 minutes before the end of the interview.