The process was followed by screen call with the recruiter, take home code challenge to be dome in 72 hours, and on site interview.
The first interview with the recruiter was OK, after 2 days or so I received the code challenge to do in home. I've asked to postpone the challenge for the next week, because I was exhausted from the longest incident we faced in my company (I am SRE). It came as a surprise that the recruiter said it could not be postponed, and had sent the code challenge saying to complete as much as I could.
I was shocked by that. After this bizarre attitude, I just continued the code challenge in respect to the person who had referred me.
I personally liked a lot of the test, it's a low level network task which stresses you a bit.
I receive an email for the next round which would be a on-site visit and talk to two SRE one hour each.
The first SRE was a pretty nice guy, he asked me to introduce myself, we reviewed the solution, what could be better, what I am doing at my company, what was my last project, how to do monitoring etc…
I had a positive feeling from that conversation and it was pretty well in my point of view.
The second SRE was a nice guy too. He again asked to introduced myself and I had to repeat all. Besides he asked low level question about networking, the conversation was more focused in security. I am not a security specialist at all and I said this to him. I was trying to pull the conversation to reliability engineering and operations work i.e (incident management, resilience (chaos), alerting, monitoring, SLOs & SLIs, troubleshooting, capacity planning, high available and resilient architectures), we talked very shortly in the end of the interview about a incident and nothing more than that. In my point of view the interview was more for SecDevOps and not SRE. I asked if they have rebranded their DevOps team to SRE and he said YES.
Since the interview was focused on security and they don’t have DevOps (they are all SREs), I got the impression that they are unable to focus on doing site/service reliability work, we haven’t discussed any of the core concepts of site reliability engineering, maybe they are or will IDK.
I asked for feedback to the interview process, and as usual I haven't received any. Unfortunately it's like that, you spent time you don't have for the company and you don't get a quick reply, it does not need to be too sophisticated, just say: "We need folks with deeper knowledge of security or something like that. However we liked 'this' and 'that' skill of yours" so we candidates don't stay guessing for months what could be better, and perhaps apply again in a near future. If no feedback is given, it's very unlikely the candidate will apply again,