The first round was a LeetCode Easy challenge with a bright and engaging interviewer. Next was a virtual on-site, beginning with a coding challenge—another LeetCode Easy.

The interviewer had a lot of latent anger and ignored me, multitasking through most of the interview. The behavioral/experience interviewer seemed distracted and may also have been multitasking; they asked a lot of odd questions, either intentionally or because their experience is in a different niche.

The third round was architecture. The whole point of which apparently was to funnel me into a gotcha, and then deliver a ten-minute monologue about an arcane problem their team had solved and how brilliant they were.

The final round involved more LeetCoding with someone who seemed to have depression. This person talked at length about the same arcane problem the previous interviewer had mentioned, indicating they were quite proud of that solution.

Amusingly, I was dinged once for suggesting a cloud-native solution where I could have installed the software directly, and later dinged for suggesting installing software directly where I could have used a cloud-native solution. Both instances involved the same type of technology.

Takeaway: Datadog appears to be modeling itself after the FAANG companies, but needs to hire individuals who enjoy problem-solving for its own sake and are unconcerned with the lack of a meaningful big picture. Because of this business and marketing patterning, I worry they will want to, and will have to, conduct mass layoffs in the coming months.

Tell me about a time when you had a conflict and how you addressed it.