The phone interview started off well and was positive. It involved a fairly easy coding problem which I completed within the timeframe. The interviewers were kind and helpful.

The second interview consisted of multiple sessions, mixed between coding, design, and managerial topics.

I experienced issues where the recruiter couldn't get back within a reasonable timeframe and couldn't figure out simple time differences. They called multiple times, at different times than scheduled. They then scheduled an interview on the wrong day (less than 12 hours from our conversation) and got mad when I didn't show up, which was quite unprofessional.

Finally, during the interview, one of the sessions was to implement a solution to a common concurrency problem. I had written very similar solutions to this type of problem in the past and was familiar with different implementations. I wanted to go with a particular implementation, but the interviewer had their own idea and wanted to solve the problem in their way. That's fine by me, but I had to change my solution halfway to match what they expected, which didn't make sense in ways I had tried to explain, but they didn't understand (related to the language's concurrency paradigm, in which they weren't very experienced). I felt this reflected a lack of knowledge on the interviewer's part.

Then, during one of the design sessions, one of the interviewers didn't pay attention throughout the whole timeframe. Towards the end, they started talking about an issue completely unrelated to the solution and didn't know why I hadn't done that, even though I had an alternatively viable solution. If they had paid attention, it would have made sense, rather than at the last 10 minutes not understanding anything going on. It was a very weird and unprofessional experience.

Other than those issues, the other sessions were mostly positive. The other interviewers were very respectful and knowledgeable in their domains.

Overall, I had expected a lot more from a company like Confluent. I'd probably rate the overall interview process as slightly negative.

Concurrency and distributed systems problems