I matched with commercetools on angel.co. Since the job listing was clearly targeted at more senior engineers and I was looking for my first job as. a self-taught engineer, I was a little hesitant. The HR professional who reached out to me was extremely understanding and encouraged me that commercetools likes my profile and wants to take the next step. She clearly took the time to check my Github account and was just overall very nice yet professional. The first interview was technical yet high-level. I'm sharing the following detail from this interview for two reasons: There's always stuff going wrong. Nobody is perfect, and I want other candidates looking for a job to understand that things can go wrong. Nobody is perfect, but that's normal. The interviewers were very polite, and understanding showed just enough humor to defuse the situation and helped me over my embarrassment. Just one minute before the call, my headset broke. I was at my girlfriend's house, and the only fix I could come up with in the short amount of time left till the start of the interview was grabbing one of my girlfriend's pantyhoses from the drawer wrapping it around my head to keep the headset in place. The interviewers found the thin line between awkwardness and pretending that nothing is wrong and laughing about this odd situation. I actually managed to overcome my embarrassment and nervousness thanks to how they managed to handle the situation and were able to answer their questions to the best of my abilities. After this interview, I was invited to two on-site interviews. The first interview was about my goals, how I approach problems, how I want to work, and general aspects of cultural fit. Looking back and comparing it with my experience from following behavioral interviews, I felt like my interviewers had a genuine interest in getting to know me. I think the interviewers were well-meaning. But after I introduced myself and my background, the interviewer started by asking, "So you've been writing code for only two years. What can you possibly know?" Looking back, I think the interviewer wasn't hostile and only wanted to challenge me as a candidate. Since I was already questioning if I should even be there and struggling to keep my nervousness under control, this introduction threw me off. This was my 3rd interview, and I had never coded on a whiteboard, so when I was asked to write code for currying a function, something I did on my own projects countless times, I couldn't do it. The interviewer asked me to come up with the one reason for currying in JavaScript. I listed multiple reasons, but none of them matched what the interviewer expected. After that, the interviewer wrote down some code on the whiteboard. Now, I had never seen this code. Today I know that it's a common interview question asked by many companies (google "Google Javascript Interview Question"). But back then, I couldn't really regain my self-esteem and was completely blocked. At that point, the interviewers noticed that I was intimidated by how they conducted the interview and switched the pace, but it was already too late. I don't think that my interview was especially unfair, and at any point, the interviewers were professional and friendly. Since my experience during the previous interviews and throughout the whole prior process was extremely positive, I was caught off guard. I expected that I wouldn't get an offer, but I went into the interview believing that I would show my full potential. I want to share some feedback and suggestions on improving the interview process, especially for candidates that do not have a lot of interview experience. I think there was no bad intention behind it, but if a candidate is invited to an interview, no interviewer should ever hint that the candidate shouldn't have been invited. I understood that commercetools rarely ask candidates to solve take-home challenges because the company doesn't want to invest candidates too much of their time, which is quite fair. But this leaves it to the interview to prove all of their skills. For some candidates, especially those who don't have too much interview experience, it would be extremely helpful to choose to work on a challenge beforehand. That wouldn't rule out the possibility of asking any questions during the interview. But for me, as a candidate, just being able to start from something and maybe going through that code first answering questions would have made all the difference. Asking questions that are very common and coming up in many interviews favors candidates who went through many interviews. I believe that there are better ways to test the relevant skills of a candidate.