1. Recruiter Screen A recruiter scheduled a phone screen for a staff software engineer position, but later I found out it was actually for a senior role. The screen was pretty typical, reviewing my resume.

2. Technical Screen Knowledge-based questions covering a wide variety of topics from CS fundamentals to Android development.

3. Take-Home Assignment

4. Onsite Interview My recruiter sent me an email saying I passed the assignment and would be interviewing onsite with the huddles team. I enjoyed my interviews with the team, but was caught off guard again when I realized my interviewers were not on that team, so the questions I prepared were moot. Mistakes happen, so I didn't make a big deal of it.

After my interview, I met with the recruiter to describe my interviews. I felt my performance was strong and that I was still interested in the position. She knew that I was abroad traveling and offered to send an email for results. It wasn't easy waking up to interview, so we agreed that unless it was an offer, we would communicate via email.

Two days later, I received an email asking for a meeting, so I was excited and expected an offer. After setting my alarm to wake up again, she told me it was a rejection. She refused to provide feedback, just saying, "another person filled the immediate needs of the role more closely than me." Instead, she offered an opportunity to interview with the team I was supposed to. So it was unclear whether I just didn't do as strongly as I thought, or if it was from the scheduling mistake with the teams that I needed to interview again for the role.

For the recruiter to wake me up at night, despite knowing I was traveling and after we agreed to send rejections via email, sets a false expectation. The offer to interview with a different team could just be one line in an email.

After that frustrating meeting with the recruiter, I agreed to talk with the original team. Like the onsite interviews, Slack required me to wake up at night to interview. But the hiring manager did not arrive. I pinged the coordinator, but received no response. As I was already awake and didn't want to reschedule, I sent an InMail to the said manager on LinkedIn. This is not normally something I do in order to respect boundaries, but I didn't know what was happening in this interview. Later, I was told he was in a family emergency and requested to reschedule, so I picked from their calendar link. My coordinator then asked to reschedule as the manager couldn't make my selection work.

At this point, I realized they weren't serious and their process was a hot mess.