Standard Interview Marathon.

Interviews with the recruiter, hiring manager, architect, code-review, whiteboard, and managers over the course of 3 weeks.

The technical people seemed competent and easygoing. The managers were stiff and unfriendly.

The code challenge was to create an integer server which wrote distinct integers from 5 clients to a file. The performance requirement was 200K transactions per second on an 8-core, 16GB JVM.

I delivered 2-4 million TPS on a 1GB JVM.

According to the recruiter, I was the only candidate (of the 4) to complete the coding challenge. The code reviewer said, "it was the best one he had ever seen," but didn't understand how the concurrency control worked and needed me to explain it.

The managers asked me over and over how I dealt with conflict. I spent 90 minutes explaining how to build consensus. Apparently, they are not a consensus-building organization.

In the final meeting with the hiring manager, he told me it was the managers who cast the veto and that they decided to eliminate the job instead of hire me.

So it turned out that New Relic is more interested in "cultural fit" than technical skill.

So there is a reason New Relic's biggest challenge (according to them) is scalability. They reject talent that can help stretch the boundaries of their systems because management is unable to manage diverse people.

Sounds like they need new managers. They are lucky I am not a person of color, or there would have been a lawsuit.

How do you deal with the "not invented here" syndrome?