The interview process was very lengthy, spanning about seven phases. The hiring team was genuinely kind and respectful at the beginning. They appeared to be a fresh startup, but in fact, they still operated with an old-school culture, similar to Oracle sales.

My last challenge ended badly. It's okay for me to fail, but they provided feedback and treated me as guilty for my mistakes. I learned a lot technically, but I didn't learn anything else from the challenge. I witnessed a drastic shift from smiley to angry on the hiring manager's face as soon as he realized I failed their challenge. The hiring manager may feel he wasted his time, but I also equally wasted my time preparing for it. He was a very selfish and rude hiring manager with clearly two faces, making for an unpleasant overall experience.

I somewhat feel lucky I didn't make it, as I can imagine working with him would cause me more pain later. Don't try hard to fit into their fixed-mind culture. Many learned the hard way from RDBMS, while they are ironically trying to sell flexibility through NoSQL. The culture I observed is very toxic, as they are aggressively moving more towards a commercial mindset rather than the technical mindset from which their real value originated in open source. Do not dream that they are empowering you.

Challenge: Technical Presentation & MongoDB Atlas Discovery