Recruiter call, Hiring Manager behavioral round, Karat Technical round, Staff Engineer technical round, offer/reject. I got interviewed for the growth team. Everything was easy, smooth, and good until I got rejected saying they were expecting someone more technical. I explored their public-facing app "technically" and discussed several points regarding security, performance, potential features, etc with the staff engineer, who got very defensive and tried to explain what he thought were the answers. He thinks it's a security risk to move their react deployments to a CDN like Azure CDN for faster access, while everything they have is on Azure. He also thinks it's ok to keep using the old react versions like 16.9.0 because Facebook is not secure enough !! When you don't know an answer, shout "Security" and you will be good. He is all good with 40 script files added on their index.html, half of which are blocked by CSP and another half by my Anti-virus. He asked me to check my anti-virus :D. I think they are looking for someone incompetent so they can be safe while the company layoff developers. In May they lay off 90 people and in June they are looking for new ones.

A standard interview process made uncomfortable by regulations. The interview was recorded so others could watch it, which made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. This for me was a big red flag for the company whether they intended it or not.