Mastercard has some great people, but the interview process was less than ideal. I first met a director at an online tech event. She was charismatic, inspiring, and very friendly. I wanted to work with her. We connected after the meet up and she introduced me to a tech lead at Mastercard that was hiring another engineer for his team.

The tech lead and I connected through a 30 minute call. He was very nice and knowledgeable. He told me about his team and explained the interview process. Through this call I understood that I won't be given a traditional algorithm challenge but instead, a take home challenge. He also explained that an internal recruiter will be reaching out to start the interviewing process with their recruitment system.

A week later I reached out to follow up on both the code challenge and the interviewing process. He explained that he's in the middle of transitioning teams and he's working with a new recruiter. It'll take a few more days before they reach out.

Another week later, the recruiter reached out to schedule a phone screening. It was a pleasant call. I was then asked to apply to a position through their system. The positions was for a senior software engineering role, which started the confusion because I was under the impression that I'd be applying to a front end position. I am not senior. I applied anyway so that I could continue the process.

The technical interview was a 1 hr panel interview. I was given a repository to read through and write a new feature for. This was more intimidating than an algorithm interview. 3 engineers watched me in silence as I tried to read through the repository and readme and build a feature. About 15 minutes into the call, one of the engineers asked me to jump to the coding portion. I was frazzled, I felt like I didn't fully understand the feature yet.

None the less I moved to the next round, which was with a technical PM. He asked behavioral questions, situational questions, and frontend framework questions.

The final interview was with a non-technical manager. I was able to learn more about the company culture and team dynamics during this call.

About a week later, I received an email saying that they were "unable to move forward at this time because the position has been put on hold." They also asked if there were any other opportunities I was interested in with Mastercard.

Overall, I met some great people, but the interview process was not enjoyable and I was pretty confused with what happened.

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