I applied for TBD, which is a child company of Block. I had an initial technical screen which went very well and lasted for 60 minutes. I was able to solve the problem in the allotted time and had a good experience here. The problem came after the next round in which the hiring manager and I had a 30 minute call. In this, the HM asked me very little, instead telling me about the company and asking me whether I'm interested in the problem they are solving. I was. After what seemed to be a positive call, I was given a rejection email the following morning. I asked the recruiter if I could get any information on why I was rejected, and I was told that I was "too inexperienced" for the job, despite having over 14 years in the industry, and no questions asked of my experience in the previous interview. I was then told that I could apply for a different role with the company, but would have to start the entire process from the beginning. After choosing a similar role (with a skillset that matched my experience even more than the Platform Engineer role), I was again told that I need to go for a less experienced role. I then picked a final lesser position (senior level) and was ghosted.

Deceptive interview practice for a 60m tech screen. Here's how it went: Introduction: 5-10m Them: So, we are going to present some questions to you that we want you to solve through CoderPad. Them: Act like this is a pair programming session (but no further explanation of what that actually means to them). 🔻 Them: Make sure you are talking through what you are doing, and how you are thinking, as we want to know how you solve problems. 👍 Question 1: a simple problem, finished in ~10 minutes Question 2: as I was solving this, I ran into a couple of things, one of which was a bug in the Golang Docs page for the standard library. Then I ran into another problem, regarding CoderPad won't let you import non-standard library packages. Then I ran into another problem in my implementation, that I didn't account for, that had to do with duplicates. Then I ran into another problem in my implementation, that I didn't account for, in regarding a non-nominal initial implementation that would result in non-deterministic behavior. I was verbose through all of this. Every "shortcut" I took, I was upfront about, and explained why I wasn't doing something in a particular way, and to just let me know if that's a "requirement". Dropped some statements about Big(0) performance characteristics of this and that, etc... And we reached the 50m mark... Questions: 5-10m --- Seems all well and good. Get a response < 24hrs later that they "decided to go with another candidate". Called the recruiter to get more information. He didn't complete all the questions in time. Oh 🤔 that must have been a 3-part question... well, they didn't set any expectations for what "success" meant for this interview. 🔻 Recruiter: Actually, it was a 4-part question. 🔻 Ok, so what they actually wanted, was for me to complete a 4-part question in 40minutes... 🔻 I wasn't told how many parts there were going to be, so I wasn't thinking about pacing or anything like that. I'm imagining also that each part of the question gets harder than the last, so it seemed I was setup for failure.