Firstly, reference the other most recent "Site Reliability Engineer." Their interview process was almost identical to what I went through. It was the most embarrassing (for GitHub) and frustrating interview process I have ever experienced.

Let's first talk about timeliness, and the fact that GitHub doesn't seem to understand it. At the time of my first phone screen with the recruiter, I was in the later stages of interviews with other companies and made it clear that I would like to see if we could expedite the process. She said, "I have gotten a candidate through the process in as little as a week." However, I started interviewing in August and finished last week (October)!

For this role, the interview process starts with a standard phone screen with the recruiter over video chat (Zoom). Red flags started to pop up immediately. When I tried to join the Zoom conference at our scheduled time, I joined in the middle of an ongoing conference with another person! To add to the awkwardness, the recruiter kicked me from the Zoom chat. I sat at my computer, dumbfounded and feeling awkward about what had just happened. I quickly realized the recruiter was using the same conference IDs for their candidates. WTF?

I awkwardly sent an email to the recruiter explaining what happened, but received no response for the next 30 minutes. It wasn't until I CC'd who I assume is the Recruiting Coordinator that she actually responded. She apologized for the confusion and offered to reschedule the phone screen. That's really not cool for someone who already has a job and took a personal day off to do a video interview, setting the precedent for this whole terrible experience.

After another week of waiting, we finally got to talking about the role, requirements, and interview process over the phone. The role sounded like a match, and I was genuinely interested in working for GitHub. She said the SRE team was working on a homework assignment to complete as the next stage of the interview, so to hold on until they were done, and she would contact me with the details. (What happened to the process taking one week??) She also openly said, "I get so many emails, so sometimes I don't respond and they get lost." Wow... This is actually coming out of the mouth of the recruiter? Another red flag. At least she offered me her phone number and said I could text her if it was urgent. Albeit kind of weird, I took the number.

I waited a week. Then another week. I emailed the recruiter, yup, you guessed it. No response. I texted her, querying about the status of the homework assignment. No response. Again, I CC'd the recruiting coordinator and magically got a quick response (hmmmm). Finally, she said the homework project was almost done and should be ready next week. To give them credit, it was indeed ready the next week. She sent me over the homework and I had 8 hours to complete it, starting from the date/time I gave her.

The homework project was actually quite fun and was fairly straightforward to knock out in about 2 hours. I submitted the homework and waited a week to hear back that the team would like to interview me in two separate Zoom phone screens to review my code.

I unfortunately had to wait two weeks for the tech interviews due to scheduling conflicts, further adding to the time. I honestly don't think anyone who does not have a full-time job already would have any patience left at this point. However, I decided to move forward anyway. The first tech interview was "interpersonal," which is the cookie-cutter "tell me a time when" type interview. Both interviews seemed pretty monotone and straight to the point (standard). One interviewer even admitted this interview was particularly robotic. It was mostly questions about my experience and how I would solve technical challenges.

Next was the coding review portion of the interview where the interviewers and I looked through the code I submitted with the homework. This part was pretty fun and I feel went over very well. The interviewers had some thoughtful questions, and I actually implemented some of the improvements we came up with and tested them live (it worked!). Overall, it was pretty awesome, and I came away from both interviews thinking I did really well.

I waited a few days and got the standard "Thank you for your time, we are moving forward with other candidates" email. I felt really confused at this point; I thought I did pretty well in the interviews. I sent a follow-up email to the recruiter thanking her for letting me know but also wanted to ask for feedback. I knew this was moot as I never heard a response back.

Overall, the interview process, as I and the other candidate on Glassdoor had experienced, was absolutely abysmal. I cannot believe the communication problems, messed-up timelines, and overall awkwardness that came from this. After experiencing this, it has definitely turned me away from wanting to work here in the future.

A homework assignment on a private repo.