Initial contact and follow-up were very good. I was not actively looking, and the recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn. The follow-up was prompt and courteous. The initial interview was with the recruiter.

Next, I interviewed with the Hiring Manager. This involved a couple of technical questions in Java, nothing too difficult, mostly on collections.

The second round was with a senior developer from the team. This was a collaborative online coding session. Again, nothing difficult. It involved a simple String Reversal (without using Java APIs) and a Shell Script.

After that, an in-person interview was scheduled. I flew to Los Gatos for interviews that were 45 minutes each:

• Manager: Mostly about the current work, architecture, and my specific role.
• Senior Person who did the telephone round: More on dependency management, practical issues, Gradle, tools, and opinions on open-source software.
• Senior Developer: A quick Java coding question. The second question was more stylistic or tool-related (Mock framework), and I was caught a little off-guard regarding what the interviewer was trying to assess. I still felt it was a bit silly to gauge someone on a tool/API.
• Another Senior Developer: Scaling, log files, HTTP codes, and RESTful service error handling.
• Recruiter: About Netflix culture.
• Director: General overview and questions.

The next part was disappointing. The manager came in around 4:30 PM and gave the feedback: "Looking for a candidate with more Java background." Seriously? There were only two questions on Java, and I am confident I answered one correctly, while the other was tool-related.

There were no data structures, algorithms, or logic testing questions. I was unsure how they concluded I wasn't a good Java candidate (oh well, I've been coding in Java for 14 years now).

I did contact the hiring manager for detailed feedback and was told that, more than Java specifically, they didn't feel I would complement their existing team's skill/strength (which is precisely what, I do not know).

That is the end of the story. The moral: It was just not my day. In all fairness, everyone was professional, but I felt there was a huge gap in how they were evaluating a candidate's skills. Believe me, this is not a "sour grapes" story.

Nothing too difficult, I would say. If you are an experienced candidate, there were no curveballs – not at least in my case.