45 minute call with a recruiter. 1 hour technical interview with an engineer on the team. 1 hour chat with the hiring manager. There are several reasons for the negative review: - The biggest one. The recruiter told me how it was important for the company to treat employees well. The hiring manager praised me during the chat 3 times for my different qualities. The a rejection. A rejection by itself is fine. But it was a standard rejection message. And when I asked the recruiter for any feedback, there was no reply at all - and it has been more than two weeks. The company doesn't seem to be willing to even provide feedback to people it considers remarkable. - The mailing system for the company is configured weird. My emails to the recruiter and to the interviewing engineer resulted in a mailing error message. Apparently, Tigera's Google Workspace setup has some policies configured to reject incoming messages, which includes mine. So it is impossible to do something like confirming proposed interview times or rescheduling a call. I told about this to two people I talked to. Neither even reacted to that, my emails kept getting rejected. Had to confirm interview times by contacting the recruiter on Linkedin. - The technical interview was weird: = First there was a coding exercise. The interviewer introduced it as a "leetcode exercise" despite the recruiter not even mentioning leetcode interviews. While I had some in the past, such interviews can be failed easily - depending on the problem complexity - if you haven't been solving leetcode problems recently. So I believe that testing leetcode skills without letting your interviewee to prepare is a bad practice. Luckily, i was given a rather easy problem. = Then I was asked about Kubernetes and Docker. That led nowhere, as I didn't have personal production experience with those, even if worked with Borg that Kubernetes is based on. I agree that me having hands-on experience with Kubernetes would have been better, but I never tried to hide my lack of personal experience with that specific tool. = Then it was a bunch of encyclopedic knowledge questions - those you can answer without prior knowledge by googling for 10 minutes: "what is the difference between TCP and UDP", "what is a context window for LLMs" etc. As such, it felt like the interviewer was not interested in anything other than basic coding and Kubernetes + Docker, almost totally ignoring all other experience or useful skills that I have.