The overall interview process is pretty mature and good overall. The recruiter who reached out to me was mixing formal and informal approaches very well (shout out to Babatunde!). They professionally handled the initial call and the aftermath call which unveiled the real reason for the refusal. Thanks Datadog for providing such feedback so candidates understand what and why!

So the hiring process started after the message from the recruiter who proposed an interview for the open position. I liked this opportunity, and we started with the recruiter's basic screening call, which went very well. The recruiter told me about the expectations so I could align during the tech call.

The technical interview also went kind of well. The problem I got to solve was pretty simple with the very basic sliding window under the hood. So, if you’re comfortable with speaking your thoughts out loud while solving the issue, you can expect that the coding part is relatively simple. But… I got a refusal. First thing first, I thought that it was because I lacked 2-3 minutes to finish the addition task I got after solving the base one, but I was wrong. The issue wasn’t in me doing anything wrong; it was the interviewer who acted unprofessionally. So, the thing is that according to the feedback, my solutions were “very good,” but communication wasn’t. Which isn’t true, as I’ve been speaking every idea I had out loud during the coding session, trying to keep the interviewer in the context of my solutions. I’ve also asked a few clarifying questions during the session, though it was only a few as the task was pretty simple and straightforward. Finishing the session, I articulated verbally the main idea of the second task solution, as I needed a couple more minutes to finish, but the time was over. Finally, when I received the interview feedback, I was very surprised, to say the least, to hear that the communication was bad and I probably have a language barrier. All of that is far from reality, especially the language barrier stuff, as I’m working using English fluently for many years.

So, the message of this review is to be cautious about communication. And if you feel that the interviewer was the one who was poorly communicating, try to mention this to the recruiter. Maybe this will save you. Good luck!

A medium-sized description of the task, not too large, not too small. The main idea was to use the most basic sliding window for queries on the metrics.