Contacted directly by a manager through LinkedIn asking if I was interested in an open position they had. Few days later I received an automatic email from their HR system confirming the beginning of the interview process. Nobody from HR has ever called me up or contacted me by any form throughout the entire process, the only contact was this manager.

The first step was a coding challenge to solve at home in 1 week. Three days later the manager contacted me asking to submit the solution as soon as possible because of some undefined "internal hiring issues", which I was not given the privilege to know about more in detail. Anyway, this rang a bell for me already since it was like they were testing my ability to provide results with an unexpectedly shorter deadline. Though, I've never had the confirmation of this.

I provided the solution and it was good so they invited me to a second round of interviews, this time in person at their offices. No description whatsoever of what kind of interview I was about to have, apart from an unclear "technical one". It ended up being a live programming session where two guys saw in detail my code asking me a lot of technical, very detailed questions and also to implement a new feature in front of them. I did it well and the guys were happy.

I was on my way back home and the manager contacted me on LinkedIn again asking me if I was available to come back again the next day for the third round of interviews. I negotiated two days since it was impossible for me. No information whatsoever again about what kind of interviews, apart from another "technical one".

It ended up being three interviews in a row with three different groups of people. All of them were very, very difficult. One guy was also difficult to understand because of his strange accent, so I didn't even understand a few questions and when I asked him to kindly repeat, he took my request like "ok, let's put it more simply". And inside of me I was like "no, let's speak clear English, please". Another guy asked me questions in such an arrogant way that it was like he was making fun of me. He even snickered when I wasn't able to answer his questions.

But most of all, and this was very upsetting to me, all the questions were absolutely far from my professional background so it was nearly impossible for me to answer correctly and in detail. At that point I started to wonder why the manager contacted me in the first place since the position was clearly different from the one he told me about on the phone.

It went very badly, of course. No official follow-up whatsoever from them, of course, but for one single informal message on LinkedIn from the manager himself asking me "did someone from my team come back to you?". I said "No". And that was it. I mean, I am supposed to receive updates from you, not the opposite! Unbelievable.

I'm actually very happy that it didn't go well. The impression I had during the whole process has been very, very uncomfortable, unnecessarily stressful and I didn't like those people at all. Zero. Also, during the interview one of the guys described quite in detail their working environment and it was so bad, but really incredibly depressing, that I even considered stopping him from talking and suddenly interrupting the interview because I already knew that I would have never worked in such a terrible working environment, no matter the salary proposed.

Really, the worst interview process I've ever experienced in all my professional career so far.

The topics include infrastructure, virtualization, networking, and low level programming.