I was approached by a Sr. Manager via Linkedin and asked if I was interested in a Staff Engineer position in the Developer Environments team. The process was standard with initial screening with a technical sourcer, a chat with the manager who approached me to discuss the role, and a remote live coding interview with two other employees. The people interviewing in each session were nice, and we could keep a fluid conversation. No red flags from the conversations. We used Google Meet instead of Discord for the call and screen sharing. Once the interview started, we did a round of introductions. They sent me a link with the requirements for writing a chat server using the standard library of a language of choice. I asked clarifying questions about the requirements and whether they wanted a working prototype or a working solution coded with more care and structure, to gauge what they would be evaluating. They told me a prototype was ok and we could refactor as the interview progressed. I started coding the exercise and talked through it, explaining what I was doing and why and asking for feedback. We got the prototype working with the basic functionality in 15 minutes. The requirements were met, except for an edge case during the chat server shutdown. We got stuck on it for the rest of the interview (another 45 minutes). The rejection email came two days later after “careful consideration of my technical performance” by the team, with no specific feedback (code/design/behavior/solving the edge case). Overall, the process does not seem calibrated to the position, role expectations, and broader candidate experience. An hour and fifteen minutes interview is definitely not enough to assess over 15 years of experience designing, building, and maintaining systems and leading projects. In my case, the process ended with an edge case with a broken TCP pipe.

In short, I had a bad experience here. The tech screen portion was poorly run due to a lack of communication and clarifying expectations. The screening call with the recruiter was pleasant and straightforward. Next, the call with the hiring manager was similarly pleasant and straightforward; however, he repeated his thoughts that teams should consist mainly of junior engineers and that there were very few principal engineers in the company. His remarks gave the impression of ageism towards experienced candidates and that the deck was already stacked against me; it also gave me a negative impression of possible career growth and, thus, little to look forward to. Next was a tech screen. The interviewer was friendly, but it was poorly run. The task was to build a socket server servicing multiple clients; straightforward enough but the instructions were extremely terse. I wondered what else they were looking for (architecture, class design, error handling, fault tolerance, testing, performance, style, docs, etc?), but the interviewer wouldn't answer any questions and just shrugged. It turns out they were looking for speed. I can go fast when called for but in my experience, most interviewers are looking for more than speed. I created a socket server that handled communication with multiple clients but was rejected because I wasn't fast enough. I left the interview feeling frustrated at how inefficient the process was. The whole thing felt like a waste of time simply due to poor communication. I would have had a better experience if the interviewer had simply communicated. In hindsight, however, I doubt Discord would have been a place I would have enjoyed working if my experience is indicative of what it's like to work there.