I applied for roles online and was then contacted by a recruiter to initiate the interview process. The process began with a phone screen conducted by a Senior Software Engineer. We utilized HackerRank to tackle a string-based problem, and we discussed its runtime and potential improvements.

The next step was the onsite round, conducted virtually and arranged through a second recruiter. It consisted of four interviews:

• A coding session
• A debugging round
• A discussion with the hiring manager
• A System Design round

To their credit, the interviewers were polite, friendly, professional, and made me feel at ease.

I wish I could say the same about the recruiter and the interview process overall. You are forced to interview in Java. This insistence felt outdated, inflexible, and downright ridiculous for a general backend SWE role. My final round interviews were scheduled with no breaks in between, just about 4.5 hours of interviews back-to-back. My onsite recruiter asked me to schedule a call with her before the onsites so we could talk about what to expect, and she never showed up to both meetings I had set up.

The culmination of this intense process was unexpected silence. There was no feedback, no update, no communication of any sort. Despite my attempts to follow up, I was met with radio silence from the recruiter. Did I pass? Did I fail? Can I get any feedback to improve? Nothing, nada, zilch. I even tried following up through my first-round recruiter (who was so much nicer and more professional), but I never got any final answer.

The disappointment didn't end there. Roughly six weeks later, a different recruiter reached out for a discussion regarding another position. Yet again, after scheduling the call, I was left waiting without the recruiter showing up. This was followed by an ambiguous email inviting me for another round of phone interviews, with no details about the role, team, or compensation. I clicked on the calendar link, only to find that the link had expired.

The experience, in summary, was a lesson in unmet expectations and a lack of respect for a candidate's time and effort. If this is how you try to woo potential employees, I cannot even begin to imagine the horrors once you get your foot in the door. Perhaps this was a bullet dodged.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you can find another horse to whip, Chewy.

String-based problems, such as palindrome checks and reversing strings in place without built-in functions.

A debugging round revolved around catching logical bugs in a code snippet.