The worst interview experience I've ever had. ever.
Started out with an online assessment on a ML problem. It was pretty standard. Then after getting the feedback for this round, we moved on to a superday where I spoke to three interviewers in a day (some statistics, applied & theoretical ML, math stuff). This was scheduled a week out despite me telling them I have several offers already. But alright, certainly understandable since it’s not easy to gather three interviewers within a week. Everyone I met was really nice and the interviews went well.
Then we scheduled a round with the manager. This is when things start to get crappy. First, it was scheduled 9 days after the technical rounds. This was a bit absurd to me since it’s just one person, but fine. In the interview, the manager does not seem to know what he is looking for. We went well over time and at the end of the call, he said he did not get enough signals on my experience in ML modeling, which he did not bring up once during our 75 minute conversation. I was expecting to get an outcome (offer/no offer) the day, but it was pushed out until the next Monday.
In the coming Monday, the manager asked to schedule two more technical rounds, which this time the recruiting team promptly scheduled on Wednesday. At this time I’m already past the deadlines of my other offers, of which I pushed for extensions. They promised that this will be the last rounds of interviews and they would huddle and get results on the same day. Needless to say, I did not get any outcome on the same day. The recruiter then said they will get feedback the next day, and I did not hear from them until the end of the next day, to which they said another day. And, perhaps predictably so, nothing happened.
So another week passed by, where I was waiting for them to reach back out. On Monday, I did not get anything. Then another day. Then, finally, I got a generic rejection letter without any explanation of what has happened or any specific feedback. At this point, it’s been a month since the process started.
I’ve been on the other side of recruiting for a long time and it’s truly perplexing to me how long it took and how many deadlines have been broken. One has to make an effort to make the interview experience this bad.