The process was fairly standard: 1 technical screen followed by a 4 interview loop. Unfortunately, there were several problems in the process that impacted my ability to succeed. The preparation guidance provided was incorrect. The recruiter told me to study Leetcode for the first screening. In that interview, no coding questions were asked, only behavioral questions. The interviewer said I should work on my behavioral question responses in the next round. Of course having focused my time on Leetcode questions, I hadn't polished my answers for behavioral questions. Again, for the next 4 interviews, I was told to focus on Leetcode. And again, two of the 4 interviews had no coding. Not only did they have no coding, the first interview in the 4 interview loop was with the same person who interviewed me for the tech screen and both were fully behavioral. I wonder if there was some mix-up there. During the interviews with coding, only 15 minutes was given to solve the coding questions (these normally have at least 30 min). Additionally, one of the interviews was an interrogation to verify what's on my resume. That wasn't so bad because if it's on my resume, I can answer questions about it but I wasn't prepared for a deep dive on every aspect of REST. There was also a system design - I expected this even though the recruiter didn't actually tell me there would be a system design interview. The final thing that made this a negative experience was the pressure from the hiring team. I was told I had to schedule my final round interviews within 2 weeks or the position would close. For further context, I had applied to this position 2 months prior and had no idea if they would ever get back to me or when. I had to move a non-trivial personal obligation in order to make these interviews work. And then one of the interviewers didn't show up. I was told the recruitment team accidentally put the wrong interviewer on the loop. I guess they didn't check for an acceptance. I couldn't move my personal obligation so I told them it would have to be pushed out 2 weeks. Apparently, that was fine. So much for the position closing within those first 2 weeks. I'm rating the overall difficulty average - if I knew what I should have prepared for, the interviews were reasonable difficulty.

I applied for Principal Software Engineer for GitHub Copilot. A recruiter reached out to me by email to schedule the first screening round asap. I was surprised, because it isn't how it worked few years back - there was an introductory screening call with recruiter first. In a few days the recruiter called me from abroad on my mobile phone to discuss the interview process and expectations. Compared to few years back, information shared regarding rounds wasn't as detailed, but basic information was provided. Few years back I received information on what soft skills they are looking for in each round and that could be used to prepare examples for discussion. It was not the case this time. We did the screening round, the interviewer was based in US, it went well, a discusssion mainly about past experience. A week later, recruiter phoned me to regrettably inform me that they have decided not to move forward and provided feedback why. They reportedly saw a gap in incident handling, which looks like proxy reason to me/misunderstanding as I have really solid experience in making sure we have a quick resolution, root cause analysis and prevention. The job opening was generic, mentioned many programing languages but it turned out they use almost exclusively Go on the project. I did specifically open this question on both screening calls to judge tech fit. This, together with the solution running in Azure, where I lack experience was probably the main reason for rejection. I would have given this a positive rating if the process was as organized as few years back. It may take a few years until I apply again as the site serves as a junkyard for projects they don't want to do in US and I'm not interested in that.