I met Cloudera engineers at a conference, and after one circulated my LinkedIn profile to a few teams, a recruiter reached out to schedule an interview. I was very unimpressed with the interview coordinator. Attention to basic detail was lacking. She first scheduled my interview a week before my requested date, which ended up being the day after she replied to my email. I told her I was not available that day, and there was no response from her for one work day. In the meantime, I also emailed another recruiter I was in contact with informing her of the situation. On the evening before the mistakenly scheduled interview was supposed to take place, the interview coordinator said she went ahead and rescheduled the meeting according to the date I had originally told her. However, her email stated the incorrect timezone. Her message also contained typos. She told me to use Webex for the interview. I investigated Webex and noticed that I needed a meeting number in order to join. When I asked, she could not tell me what this meeting number was. Leaving behind Webex without explanation, she said we could also have the interview over Skype. She asked for my username twice, which I provided to her both times, and she never sent confirmation that she received and forwarded my Skype username. With this already negative impression, I would not have been surprised if no one called me at the scheduled interview time. The interviewer did call, and it was a simple interview. Domain language knowledge, live-code on coderpad.io a simple string manipulation algorithm, how would I test a particular function, open-ended analysis of a page of Cloudera manager and how to improve it. Following the string manipulation problem, an odd conversation arose. My solution was O(n/2) time, O(1) space. After I had completed the code and demonstrated that it worked with two test strings, he asked if I could do this without iteration. I asked if he meant recursion, he said no. The problem involved a string comparison, so how could a solution be possible without iteration or recursion? Turns out he expected me to reverse the string and then make a straight string comparison. I responded that this still involves iteration, even if it may not be explicit in code syntax, to which he replied after some mumbling that I was absolutely correct. Furthermore, this solution would be O(n) to reverse the string, then O(n) to do the comparison. It also takes up O(n) space. Though this solution might make a cute Python one-liner, it is inferior in terms of computing efficiency. Other impressions of this interview -- the interviewer did not know what position I was applying for, gave the impression of not having glimpsed at my background or resume at all, and during the interview he seemed to be looking through a list, trying to decide which algorithm question to ask me instead of having one prepared beforehand. Preparation aside, the interviewer had a courteous attitude, and was willing to answer several of my questions afterward. Two days later, I received an automated email that they would not be moving forward. Overall, very unimpressive. Reading the other reviews here on Glassdoor, it seems my experience is not an outlier. I enjoyed speaking with Cloudera employees at the conference I attended, but this interview process felt like a joke. From the ~15 companies I have interviewed with during my career, this was starkly one of my most negative experiences. Not something I expected with Cloudera’s projected reputation. I should have checked Cloudera’s disproportionately high negative rating here on Glassdoor beforehand to better anticipate my own experience.