I've interviewed for a backend engineering role, coming with deep experience in their development stack advertised.
The interview process was HR Screening -> Technical Interview (live coding) -> System design -> Behavioral. I got eliminated after the technical interview round.
The problem described was relatively simple, it was asking me to build two endpoints and store some data accordingly. The challenging part is they are expecting this to be "production-ready", therefore they expect you to come up with possible edge cases and consider scalability.
I had two senior engineers interviewing me and asking questions during this process, and it was 2 hours long.
Although the interview structure is good, I had some major concerns about the interviewers and how they handle the interview, and I was also in a state where I wasn't sure if I want to work with them after the interview.
- They constantly interrupted me while I was explaining my thought process, forcing me to do back and forth between different subjects and losing track of what I'm describing.
- They had an "passive-aggressive" tone of interviewing. I felt that they were not "collaborating" with me, but they were "questioning" me. I found it hard to communicate with them.
- It is mandatory to ask followup questions of course, but they forced me to follow some rabbit holes which I think wasn't necessary, causing us to lose time and lose track of the interview. When I raised a simple concern like "storing this data in memory is not ideal for a production-grade web service and I would rather follow a disk-based storage solution", they asked me to prove it, and we led to the point where I was calculating how much space in the memory we're going to use for the case. I mean in literal numbers, multiplications, research on how much space certain data structures use in memory. During the interview time. For the given problem, my honest opinion is, that energy could have been used for much better discussions about the problem itself, and they followed a similar approach for any other concern that I raised about the problem
- They openly said they "hate" a certain technology/stack that they use, while I was interviewing as a developer from that stack.
I 100% understand that I may not be the best candidate, but I do not think they did a good job evaluating my skills correctly.
