A recruiter reached out to me via GitHub, where they had found my email address after noticing my contributions to a variety of open-source projects. They mentioned they were searching for “individuals interested in writing open-source code that will instrument thousands of PHP applications around the world” and asked if I would be interested in finding out more.

We agreed on a quick 30-minute hangout where the recruiter told me more about the role and explained the process.

As the recruiter's feedback from the chat was positive, another hangout was organized with a software engineer who had been working with DataDog for about a year. In the hangout, we first chatted, then proceeded to two coding challenges on Coderpad. The software engineer sent me problems, which I solved while talking through my approach.

As the software engineer's feedback from the coding challenge was positive, I was then asked to share a couple of projects I was proud of. I forwarded a couple of open-source projects, along with blog posts I had written for them. In the meanwhile, I also contributed a bit to Datadog’s open-source projects.

As the feedback from the reviewers was positive, I was asked to work on a coding challenge homework. The task was to create an HTTP log monitoring program that would tail an HTTP log file and render a view in the console with interesting statistics, updating every 10 seconds. They suggested that quality submissions for this work take between 4 and 8 hours.

Since the feedback from the reviewers was positive, the recruiter asked me to propose dates for the final interview step, which would be a visit to Datadog's Paris office to meet and talk to other developers and managers. I proposed a few dates.

The recruiter took a couple of days to reply. He then told me that he had had a meeting with his hiring manager, and that the hiring manager had concerns whether I “have the kind of understanding of PHP internals and low-level PHP that the role will require.” When I inquired what the hiring manager meant, the recruiter replied, “The role will also leverage understanding the PHP engine itself, which will require experience with and understanding of C.” That was the first time it was mentioned they were looking for someone able to maintain PHP extensions. I replied that it would have been respectful of my time if they had mentioned that earlier in the process. The recruiter has not replied since.

I consider myself an experienced software engineer, having built software for more than 25 years and worked with PHP for more than 18 years. At no time in the interview process were exact requirements shared with me.

Build an HTTP log monitoring console program.