I was contacted by an in-house Netflix recruiter. The process was very streamlined, and everyone from start to finish was friendly.

There were phone screens with Recruiting, HR, then the hiring manager, lunch with the hiring manager, followed by a full day of interviews with six people of various titles.

Everyone was highly competent, clearly knowledgeable in their area of expertise. From the moment you walk in the door and are handed your care package with water, snacks, and your schedule neatly printed, you are made to feel important and valued.

Sadly, the first interviewer, who is considered a strong leader by his boss, showed up with very poor personal hygiene, which really put me off. His entire appearance was disrespectful in the context of interviews – not what I would consider a stellar colleague. My distaste must have shown, because he said my personality was too strong for Netflix.

Translation: If I were a man, he would say I am ambitious, a go-getter, someone who really knows their stuff and is confident in their area of expertise.

In general, do your homework. Don't waste their time by showing up unprepared. Netflix likes to hire and demote. If you were a VP before, consider being a manager now. If you're a Senior Architect, consider coming to Netflix as a tester, etc. The pay should more than make up for the lack of title.

It's a place where I can see myself fitting in very comfortably, because the business is extremely complex and fun, and everyone is driven and highly competent. I suppose it's just a matter of finding the correct fit for a team. I think I might have outgrown dev and testing entirely. This interview process really helped to cement that for me, so I'm very grateful for that.

The interviewer drew out the relevant part of their architecture on the board and asked me to debug why a message would seem to get stuck in the network somewhere. This is a real problem they faced.

Given an array of integers, find the smallest unique value.

These were the usual HR-type questions. Also, a straightforward question: "How much do you make now?"