The interview process was a collection of red flags for this company.
Their official process says you have to go through 6 interviews but I went through closer to 8 in total.
The steps were:
1) Recruiter initial call, description of company + describing myself
2) Another recruiter call, behavioral questions screening about conflict
3) Coding interview, easy coding problem with arrays
4) Block of three interviews
4.1) System design - Design a system to display a candle chart for crypto
4.2) Previous project review - Describe a multi-semester project from your previous job to figure out the E2E process from ideation to deployment
4.3) Coding interview - Harder problem with traversing a DAG and figuring out the complexity of the algo
5) Technical director review - Previous project review again, asking a bit more about leadership
6) CEO interview - Again previous project review, asking similar questions, just less technical because the CEO did not trust the other reviewers I guess?
7) Not an official interview, but the job position was not clear up until this point, so the technical director wanted to make sure if the I was interested and a good fit for the particular position they were offering. Needed on the one hand, but inefficient to not be clear about the position from the start of the process. Nevertheless, there were still questions here which could disqualify someone.
Now for the red flags in the process:
1) More than 15 different people, unrelated to my interview, visited social media to see my profile during the process. This is a privacy issue.
2) After 8 interviews, they still ask to do a reference check of 2 managers and one peer. The reference check is not a check on employment, they will try to interview the peers for ~20 minutes.
3) The process took two months , disregarding a pause I requested in the start for personal reasons and they granted.
Biggest red flags
1) They are negative to feedback
- On expressing that there's no reason to have multiple previous project reviews, they were dismissive citing that the interviewers need to ask different kinds of questions.
2) Absolute lack of trust - anecdote from below
- After receiving an offer, there were scheduling issues with one of the references because they didn't have availability. The recruiter suggested that maybe it would be possible to finish the process with 2 references and was hesitating to communicate with them stating that they might alienate them. I communicated with the reference and got assurance they would talk with them. Frustrated with their process I came back with a firm response that the reference has been informed and they should get back to them. Otherwise if they are unwilling to schedule, I would not be able to provide a different reference (as I didn't have any other recent and relevant managers) and they should decide based on the 8 interviews they already had with me and the two detailed interviews they had with my references, who did not sign up for this.
The highest C-Level, the CEO, responded to the situation above by retracting the offer since this was deemed a bad culture fit and sent a mocking reference of how the google search AI defines reference checking. They also said that they don't usually give feedback, but they would in this case due to the amount of time they spent in the process. This is not a good sign for the public face of the company.
In summary, it was a horrible experience and I'm glad in the end I didn't end up working for them unaware of their attitude.