ave been working in the industry for close to 17 years. This, by far, has been quite possibly the worst experience. While the people I met were cordial, I wish I could say the rest of the experience was.
I was contacted by head hunters sometime in April 2021. After the usual intros and resume forwarding the hiring manager wanted to move forward. My first interview was for an hour with a Managing Director and Executive Director for a fairly senior role in the organization. First interview went well enough, however I had very little time for questions. Second interview was a week or 10 days later with the hiring manager (who was on the first interview) and he wanted to have a technical deep dive with me. This went great as we both jelled very well and we had a shared vision on how things should work. I was encouraged after that especially after I was told by the head hunter that they've had this role open for a while, and 2 interviews most likely would be good enough to make an offer. I was interested in the position and was willing to leave my FAANG role for it. 10 days to 2 weeks pass by, and I'm asked to do a third interview by someone on the engineering team. I asked if this will be technical in order to prep for it, and I was told it was but might be less technical than the previous one. It was scheduled at 7am, a day after I had to go under for a minor surgery, a fact both the head hunters and the hiring team knew about yet, I was push to do it to “keep this moving along”. On my calendar, it was scheduled for an hour, for my interviewer, however, it was only scheduled for 30 min. This, again, left me with no time to ask any meaningful questions, let alone get meaningful answers. I was asked simple, and general language specific questions (java) even though I have not touched java in a while (which I informed the interviewer). I answered them from memory, and when I couldn't remember it, I was honest and said I can’t remember. There were some other questions around different design paradigms, nosql vs sql and data structures which I answered fairly well. Mind you, this role is for a cloud architecture role and not heavy hands-on programming. I didn’t do as well as I thought I should, and I figured, if the programming aspects holds a lot of weight, they will politely say they are not moving forward. Up to this point, this is all normal(ish) interview things and I’m going with the flow. What happens next is the real problem and the reason I highly recommend against working for this firm, at least the time being.
The following week, in June at this point, I get a call from the head hunters. They said that they want to move forward, and they are working on the offer and all that good stuff. In the meantime, I had an internal role at my current company that I politely walked away from since I knew there is a good chance I would walk away. A role that I was also interested in and had great potential and I was favored for. Another week goes by and I’m getting updates from the head hunters stating that they are just getting their ducks in a row and I should get the offer soon. The following week. I get a call from the head hunters first thing in the morning and they don’t sound too happy. They informed me that MSCI is no longer going to give me the offer because of “reasons” they rattled off a couple things but I wasn’t sure what they meant. Now I sat there with no role form MSCI and no role internally. This is highly unprofessional and very disorganized which makes me feel like the current state of affairs internally is one of chaos and politics. As dismayed as I may be, there is a good chance that I’ve dodged a built working for this company.
The current market conditions make highly unfavorable for organization to behave in this manner while trying to acquire hard to come by talent. And while I acknowledge that there might be some miscommunication on the head hunters end, there has to be some serious, unacceptable dysfunction on the organization’s end that helped cause this. Best of luck to the team, they will need it.