This was my experience interviewing for a Backend Engineer role at Grafana. I applied via their careers site, and a few days after, I received an email from HR to schedule a first call.

The steps were the following:

• HR screening (30 min): The recruiter didn't even turn on the camera, and we quickly talked about my experience and the role. It lasted less than 15 min.
• HR/Technical (30 min): I was invited to the next step, an HR/technical call with a Principal Engineer. This conversation was wonderful, and the interviewer was extremely friendly. We discussed the responsibilities of the role and my past experience, along with several technical questions. The project and the team looked very interesting from my side, and the interviewer was very nice.
• Coding (60 min): Here is where things get weird. A week after the last interview, I wrote back to my recruiter to ask about some updates. I received a generic email saying that she is no longer part of the company and that I should contact a different person. I appreciated that. I wrote back to the right email, and then they invited me to the next interview, a 60 min. coding exercise. That happened on a Wednesday at 16-17h, and we scheduled the interview for two days after, on Friday. What happened is that this exact same Wednesday, the day when they invited me to the interview, scheduled it, and we even exchanged several emails regarding the content of the interview and my preparation, at 21:30h I received an email from HR saying that they "have filled our headcount for this position and so we will not be progressing with your application". How can this happen? I've just scheduled an interview, and a few hours later, they told me that. I even talked with HR previously that day regarding my preparation. After this episode, the next day, I noticed that I still had my interview invitation active, so I thought it could be some kind of mistake on their side, also considering the weirdness of the events. I wrote a couple of emails to HR about this, asking for some clarification. I received no response (still not). When Friday came (the next day), I was ready for my interview and joined the call on time, but nobody showed up in the Zoom call. This full episode is not only disrespectful, but unprofessional. I am to be respected as a candidate, and I don't fear rejection, which is completely normal, but this is not the way. All candidates spend time and effort to prepare for interviews and to grow their careers throughout the years, just to be treated this way by unprofessional HR employees who ghost them like nothing. I understand sudden things could happen at some point on their side, but treating a candidate like that only states the lack of seriousness and organisation within their hiring team.
• SD

MLOps vs traditional software DevOps