I was contacted by a Facebook (now Meta) technical sourcer who said my machine learning profile stood out for their London office.

After I clarified that I live in the EU, not in the UK, and can't move to London, she passed my case on to an incredibly unprofessional technical sourcer named Bilal Ahmad, who was recruiting for Facebook Reality Labs in Zurich.

That's where the experience suddenly turned into a nightmare. The funny thing is that Bilal was very interested in my mixed reality development background (which was more relevant in this case than my ML skills). He wanted to interview me so much that he even contacted me back after our first call to share some development on my case. Yet, I refused the interview because he was so disrespectful that I didn't want to waste more time on him. Here's the thing:

Out of two calls I had with him, he was late for both and actually forgot about them in both cases. The first time, he called me after I reminded him. But the second time was crazy. He didn't show up for the call and didn't even reply to my follow-up emails or explain why he couldn't make it until three hours after the time we agreed on.

When I finally reached out to the original technical sourcer after more than an hour of waiting and asked her to remind Bilal that we had a meeting long overdue and my emails were unanswered, she let him know, and then Bilal finally answered me three hours later. But even that answer was written in an unbelievably cocky and offensive tone. He told me it was not a big deal that he missed the call and I had to wait so long. Instead of being apologetic, he tried (in a very unprofessional way) to put the blame on me, stating that I didn't answer when he finally called me two hours later (indeed, I was already in another meeting, as if I was supposed to wait for his call all day long). He ended the email with a few more discouraging, emotional sentences, clearly reflecting his frustration that I reached out to the other sourcer, which exposed his negligence.

At that stage, he asked if I wanted to proceed with the process. I said, "No thanks." I didn't see how this person would cooperate any further with such an angry attitude, and most of all, I was feeling offended and disrespected rather than appreciated, which is not the sort of environment where I would like to be interviewed, let alone work.

I don't know if this is how everything goes at Meta or if it's just one unprofessional bad recruiter who is good at hiding how he's chasing away talent rather than attracting it, but I've just checked, and this guy still works in the same role half a year later. So, I guess Facebook thinks it's okay to treat candidates like this.

In which case, I'm happy I refused to proceed with the interview and looked for a less toxic company culture.

What's your experience with AR/VR development?