- The review process was not what the recruiter stated it would be. He stated first interview would be with the CTO (which is unusual!) - it was not
- I clearly intimidated the manager in my first interview by talking about pure functional programming. He had never heard of it and did not understand what I was talking about. I tried to explain Scala functional effects; when you have to explain something to your interviewer, it is going to leave a bad taste in their mouth unless they have great command over their ego
- The 2nd interview was a live coding exercise. Their HR rep had told me this interview would involve "no live coding" - I asked - and it turned out it was all live coding.
That's fine, but there was a singular focus to this exercise: Scala performance optimization. I was presented with idiomatic Scala code and asked to rewrite it for optimum performance.
1) This is not a daily exercise for a functional programmer - per the 80/20 rule you optimize what a profiler or other tool shows you to be hot code; per software engineering norms you don't pre-optimize, especially in the functional programming world
2) This was sprung on me not just as a surprise but in direct contradiction to what their HR rep/recruiter had told me the interview would be
The interview was both Easy and Impossible - Easy in technical terms, Impossible in jumping thru the hoops that were set up
