About a year ago, I saw a job posting for Impala Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Test & Automation at Cloudera. I applied for it. The recruiter called me, and we set up time for a phone screen coding interview. After the coding phone screen, I was told I did very well in it, so I was called in for an onsite interview. I met four people.

Person 1 did the QA interview, which I did not fare well in. Person 2 did the coding/QA interview, which was not too bad. Person 3 did a pure coding interview; I did good in this. The code on the whiteboard was for a kind of tree traversal. From there, we segued into a feature I implemented using BFS and DFS algorithms. I remember this conversation with great fondness because this interviewer was a rare developer who understood and appreciated the work I had done.

Person 4 was a QA person from the group who, among other questions, was trying to fathom why I would want to become a QA after more than 15 years as a developer/tech lead/architect. I could not convince Person 4 that I actually understood the complexity of the job and was intellectually challenged by it, resulting in my desire to join the group. It was not a stepping stone for me.

I was called back after the interview to be told that I was not considered because they thought I would be unhappy at the job.

Almost a year after that, I was called out of the blue by a recruiter for Cloudera again for the same job. I was asked if I was still interested in it. I said, "Very much so, yes." An exploratory call with the present manager of the group was set up. In the conversation, I expressed my interest; the complexity of the product interested me a lot. I was told a phone coding interview would be set up.

So, exactly a year later, I was doing yet another phone coding interview, which, in my opinion, I did not do badly in. Maybe if I had 15 more minutes, I would have completed the implementation and tested it too. Two days later, I was told that I would not be considered for the position by the QA manager because, "Unfortunately, you did not do well on coding, which is why we are passing on your candidacy for now."

This has been my experience. I hope others have a better one. I do understand that not every interview results in a job offer.

General programming problems.