I was approached by a recruiter from DataDog. I spoke with her, and then with the hiring manager.

They detailed how the hiring process would involve five hour-long interview sessions, one of which would be a live-coding interview, as well as a take-home coding project.

When asked if I wanted to continue with the interview process, I said "no." I explained that their interview process sounded tedious and full of "busy work," and that I didn't want to subject myself to the stress of it.

They responded by saying they'd drop the take-home project and asked if I would reconsider. Reluctantly, I agreed.

Three of the interviews felt like they went well. One interviewer no-showed. That should have been my first clue as to how correct my original gut instinct was. But on the strength of the first interviews, I continued.

The live coding exercise allowed me to pick a language and code up a solution to a lightly-defined problem. I admit that I wasn't at my best that day, but in all fairness, I'd tried to stop the interview process long before it began.

Of course, the response was:

"We met as a team and debriefed and, unfortunately, we've decided not to move forward with an offer. It came down to coding skills and technical breadth that we need with such a lean team."

Like I said, I know I wasn't feeling at my best and didn't do as well as I'd hoped. That'll happen during a pandemic when you're working 60-hour weeks at your current job, and squeezing in five more hours just to be judged by people.

I would have thought, though, that the 900 answers (at the time) I'd posted on Stack Overflow or the two books I've written on database engineering would have made up for that. Apparently not.

The bottom line is that I was a passive candidate. I was asked to interview and clearly stated that I did not want to. After some coercing, I reluctantly agreed to interview anyway. Once I was in their interview pipeline, I was treated like an applicant, not a recruit. At no point did anyone really make an attempt to sell me on wanting to work at DataDog. And to top it off, I felt more than a little insulted on the way out.

In rereading what I have written here, the number of red flags which came up during this process was astounding. The only good to come of this was that I learned a new respect for my gut feelings.

Talk me through how you would architect this data storage system.