Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - Netherlands
October 1, 2022
Positive ExperienceNo Offer
Process
I applied via LinkedIn without referrals for a remote role in Amsterdam. The steps were:
- A call with the recruiter.
- A phone screen with two easy tasks.
- A take-home assignment (3-4 hours of coding; it can be a trap if you implement the task naively).
Then there was a virtual onsite with three rounds in one day:
- Live coding: medium complexity. I solved it and covered all the corner cases. Possibly, I could have anticipated follow-ups better. It was strange that the interviewer told me I was allowed not to bother discussing the solution and just jump into coding. I still discussed it.
- System design: one of the popular questions. I believe I did really well here and kept driving the conversation.
- Interview with the hiring manager: he seemed uninterested, distracted, or tired. There was only one 'tell me about a time' question; mostly he talked about my current project. It was a disappointment.
I checked Blind, and they had already suspended hiring for remote positions at that time. Nevertheless, the process kept rolling. I got a standard rejection email after a couple of days. The recruiter offered to provide my availability if I'd like to hear more details. I did so but was ghosted. After two weeks, I got another email with excuses and asking for my availability again, and I was ghosted for the second time. Okay, I just deleted all emails with them and moved on.
Overall, it was a good and useful experience, except for the hiring manager interview and the communication with the recruiter after rejection. It was an obvious disappointment after claims about "candidate experience."
Questions
Design and explain your current project.
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Interview Statistics
The following metrics were computed from 2 interview experiences for the Datadog Senior Software Engineer role in Netherlands.
Success Rate
50%
Pass Rate
Datadog's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in Netherlands is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.
Experience Rating
Positive100%
Neutral0%
Negative0%
Candidates reported having very good feelings for Datadog's Senior Software Engineer interview process in Netherlands.
Datadog Work Experiences
2.0
Glossy on the surface, not so great underneath
Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee
New York, New York, United States
March 11, 2024
Pros: Aggressive pay rates that aimed to compete with top-talent companies (Google and Facebook were routinely called out).
Stable company that appears to be able to weather turbulent market conditions without massive layoffs.
Cons: Leadership was very divorced from the day-to-day work of employees, which translated to a lot of needless frustration and crunch on behalf of bottom-level workers.
Company culture around DEI was shockingly poor (especially with regard to women's issues), and top-level leadership was flippant at best about these problems.
While they theoretically support remote work, in practice their benefits, IT, and HR teams are entirely focused on the main HQ locations, meaning remote employees are often left floundering on their own for even basic issues.
Crunch time was a constant expectation, especially for those lower in the hierarchy: on-call shifts of 3 weeks out of 4 was the norm, and most engineers are expected to contribute extra hours towards interviews (often multiple per week).
4.0
Great people, great product, miserable place to write back-end software
Senior Software Engineer • Current Employee
New York, New York, United States
September 24, 2024
Pros: I get to work with smart, conscientious people. The compensation is very good, and I think the core product is quite good (there's a reason people pay for it).
I enjoy most days at work, despite my complaints below.
Cons: Virtually every developer at Datadog shudders when they hear the word "Bazel". Our approach to developer experience is so, so, broken.
There's an expectation that people should build new products in (one of the several) large monorepos, but actually getting things done in those repos is brutally slow. Just launching or testing your backend service involves waiting ages for Bazel to compile a ton of unrelated code.
On top of that, we have to use a lot of bad, underdocumented, proprietary developer tooling. If you want to spin up a new REST service/Postgres instance/whatever, expect everything to take 5-10x more effort and time than it would elsewhere. You will spend more of your time learning how to do things the some-internal-team way than actually solving business problems. Edit-compile-run loops are often an order of magnitude slower than they would be at other companies.
This mess is sometimes kind of *interesting*, but it is definitely not a good way to spend software developers' time.
5.0
Performance-based evaluation; nothing else is in your way
Senior Software Engineer • Current Employee
New York, New York, United States
July 3, 2025
Pros: Engineers are treated like a high caste within the company.
Unlimited PTO. Travel to Paris at least once a year typically.
Cons: If your manager thinks you are underperforming, be wary. People are asked to leave without sympathy if you cannot pull your weight.
If you can understand how "impact" is measured here, then you can make it through the obscure language used for performance reviews and promotions.
- 2.0Glossy on the surface, not so great underneathSenior Software Engineer • Former EmployeeNew York, New York, United StatesMarch 11, 2024Pros: Aggressive pay rates that aimed to compete with top-talent companies (Google and Facebook were routinely called out). Stable company that appears to be able to weather turbulent market conditions without massive layoffs.Cons: Leadership was very divorced from the day-to-day work of employees, which translated to a lot of needless frustration and crunch on behalf of bottom-level workers. Company culture around DEI was shockingly poor (especially with regard to women's issues), and top-level leadership was flippant at best about these problems. While they theoretically support remote work, in practice their benefits, IT, and HR teams are entirely focused on the main HQ locations, meaning remote employees are often left floundering on their own for even basic issues. Crunch time was a constant expectation, especially for those lower in the hierarchy: on-call shifts of 3 weeks out of 4 was the norm, and most engineers are expected to contribute extra hours towards interviews (often multiple per week).
- 4.0Great people, great product, miserable place to write back-end softwareSenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeNew York, New York, United StatesSeptember 24, 2024Pros: I get to work with smart, conscientious people. The compensation is very good, and I think the core product is quite good (there's a reason people pay for it). I enjoy most days at work, despite my complaints below.Cons: Virtually every developer at Datadog shudders when they hear the word "Bazel". Our approach to developer experience is so, so, broken. There's an expectation that people should build new products in (one of the several) large monorepos, but actually getting things done in those repos is brutally slow. Just launching or testing your backend service involves waiting ages for Bazel to compile a ton of unrelated code. On top of that, we have to use a lot of bad, underdocumented, proprietary developer tooling. If you want to spin up a new REST service/Postgres instance/whatever, expect everything to take 5-10x more effort and time than it would elsewhere. You will spend more of your time learning how to do things the some-internal-team way than actually solving business problems. Edit-compile-run loops are often an order of magnitude slower than they would be at other companies. This mess is sometimes kind of *interesting*, but it is definitely not a good way to spend software developers' time.
- 5.0Performance-based evaluation; nothing else is in your waySenior Software Engineer • Current EmployeeNew York, New York, United StatesJuly 3, 2025Pros: Engineers are treated like a high caste within the company. Unlimited PTO. Travel to Paris at least once a year typically.Cons: If your manager thinks you are underperforming, be wary. People are asked to leave without sympathy if you cannot pull your weight. If you can understand how "impact" is measured here, then you can make it through the obscure language used for performance reviews and promotions.
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