Databricks was, without question, the worst recruitment process I went through in my job search, and perhaps ever. It was unprofessional and sloppy all around.

I was scouted by a hiring manager directly off of LinkedIn. The phone screen went great, and he said a recruiter would be in touch by the end of the week. I didn't hear anything for over a month, and the hiring manager effectively ghosted me, so I wrote it off.

After a month, I received a call and about seven unexpected texts from an unknown number. Apparently, the recruiter had been emailing some random person's address that is in no way similar to my name. They didn't think to look at the email address on the top of my resume or have the hiring manager follow up on LinkedIn.

During the screen call, the recruiter called me an inappropriate nickname. He likened my name to a beer brand that sounds similar. I hadn't heard that nickname since college a decade ago; it was cute and easy to brush off back then, but not something I ever thought I'd hear in a professional setting.

The actual interview was a disaster. I'm mid to senior level, and my interviewer was new-grad level. This isn't usually an issue, but it was in this case. She spent the first 30 minutes of my hour explaining, at glacial speed, detailed example cases for a very simple problem. I tried to tell her I understood and was ready to start writing it, but to no avail.

I did my best to catch up given the limited time, but that was further hampered by the fact that she didn't seem to know Python beyond the surface level. Even though I had written and passed test cases, she insisted that I'd done something wrong building a heap in Python. I'm expert-level and have worked with Python as a primary language for the past five years, including at a FAANG company.

I assured her I was doing it correctly. I tried to explain that the passing tests demonstrated that it worked, but she wasn't convinced. In the end, it took about five to ten minutes of me explaining in detail how heaps are implemented in Python for her to agree that I had, in fact, done it correctly. And then, with three minutes left, she dropped a Part 2 to the problem, which I was able to state an optimal solution to but of course didn't have time to implement.

I wasn't surprised to get a rejection the next day, but after that experience, I didn't particularly want to work there. It really speaks to their recruiting culture and clearly shows a low quality of interview training.

Designing a simple wrapper on a database with two ingestion methods and a retrieval method for k items with a minimum value above a threshold.