The recruitment team reached out to schedule my interview. Some of my points might be repeated with another review for Engineering Manager Frontend, but unfortunately, it was the same experience.

Technical Interview (Round 1):

• Two Staff Engineers conducted the interview.
• Based on their knowledge, they seemed to be at an SDE1 or, at best, SDE2 level compared to other companies.
• They had a set of theoretical questions, asking them one by one, similar to a non-technical person looking for keywords. If found, they moved to the next question.

The Talent Acquisition team had provided a HackerRank link, but these interviewers seemed disinterested in using it to discuss any questions in the editor. It was also disrespectful that neither interviewer turned on their video, even for introductions.

Techno Managerial Interview (Round 2):

• One Engineering Manager UI took the round.
• The interviewer barely spoke more than ten sentences during the entire interview.
• Again, he had a set sheet of interview questions, asking them one by one. The behavior was exactly the same as in the previous rounds: looking for keywords, and if found, moving to the next question. Funnily enough, all of these were behavioral questions, and he expected standard Google/ChatGPT-level answers, not real experiences.
• None of his questions had follow-ups. Literally zero follow-up questions. Even if someone had claimed to have built ChatGPT's LLM in one day, there would have been no follow-up on how that was possible.

Feedback: Thank goodness at least their HR did a job of sharing transparent feedback.

• All his questions had explanations with example-backed responses, but he rejected based on a single line where I mentioned why I left my previous company. The entire rejection was based on the line: 'In my last job, I was hired as an IC, but after a while, I was expected to do 100% of IC work with managerial work, without reducing any IC bandwidth.' To this, the HR said I should have lied diplomatically for this.
• Another feedback was that the question 'Tell me a time when you had a wrong hire?' received a not-up-to-the-mark response. I mentioned I hadn't had a wrong hire but understood that a candidate had an attitude which I worked on after the hire, which was a real story. However, the interviewer expected me to have had a wrong hire. So, in order to get hired at Zscaler, you apparently need to have made a wrong hire.
• Another feedback point was hilarious. He wrote that I was good at doing both tech and managerial parts together, which contradicts his idea in the first feedback.

Technical Interview (Round 1):

• What are React hooks and components? How do they relate to each other?
• What are the hooks you use?
• What is useEffect with and without a dependency?
• What is the React class component lifecycle?
• What is Redux? What is the Redux cycle?
• What is the event loop?
• What is a closure?
• What is the CSS box model?
• More of these basic-level questions.

Techno Managerial Interview (Round 2):

• What are some projects you have worked on majorly in your last two companies?
• Tell me about a time when you had a wrong hire.
• How did you mentor any person as a manager?
• Tell me why you feel you are a good fit for a manager position.
• Tell me about a time you had direct interactions with a client.