I applied for a Java position (Staff SW Engineer) to work with PKI at the HydrantID product. After a friendly call with the recruiter and the hiring manager I was invited to a technical interview in Prague. There was miscommunication between the engineering team in Prague and the talent team in Poland. The HR coordinator had sent out interview invitations, but she was overruled by an engineer in Prague, who hijacked the process from the talent team. Before the onsite interview I asked the hiring manager if I need to bring my own computer: He said it was not necessary. The interview took place in a small meeting room. I was met with a panel of 6 people: 3 staff engineers who interviewed me, and 3 other silent observers who had no other purpose than trying to put psychological pressure on the candidate. I was asked to code on paper, but there was no paper in the room. The interviewers had printed copies of my CV. One of the interviewers suggested that I could just write the code on the back of my CV, to which I refused. The interview centered around priority queues. Surprisingly the questions were all about Python programming. At no point did we talk about Java, PKI, security, design patterns, OOP or anything relevant to the position. As I already had experience working with priority queues, I was confident in the topic and had good stories to share from my work creating a least-cost SMS routing engine. Later they asked: "Is it correct that you are an AWS Certified Solution Architect?". I confirmed. "Ok, how will you create a high-availability relational database on AWS?" I responded to use the AWS product "Aurora Serverless" which offers highly available (Multi-AZ), scalable SQL out of the box. The interviewer heard the word "serverless" and mistakenly thought I was talking about AWS Lambda or compute. Due to his own limited knowledge of AWS services, he then failed me from the interview, despite that I provided the correct solution. Everyone was friendly and polite, but HID's hiring process seemed disorganized and unprofessional. After the interview, they ghosted me.