The process began with two voice calls: first, a conversation with the recruiter, followed by an engineering questions interview. After that, there were two scheduled online "Codility" programming tests. At that point, I decided to give SpaceX the wide berth that many others suggest here, rather than subject myself to the insanity of these online tests.

One day, companies might realize that this kind of highly impersonal, dehumanizing hiring process is quite broken. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the daily work that software engineers do and is far more likely to turn away the best talent and discourage the best coworkers. Stop hazing your candidates with meaningless hurdles. An engineer with over 20 years in the business likely DOES know how to code.

This was particularly true when I learned they'd need up to 8 hours of my time for just one of these tests to simply figure out if I could actually code. Other companies accomplish this in less than 45 minutes. I basically called that rubbish and decided to withdraw from this hiring process.

The technical interview with a human being was standard stuff:

• Multithreading
• Architecture
• Coding
• Similar boilerplate technical questions
• A discussion of their current needs

At least up to this point, I was still very interested in exploring the opportunity. Then things got stranger.