Overall easy interview. Two interviews one with a Manager + two of his cronies, one with the director. Manager interview was mostly technical. One of the cronies drilled me in Java questions, and they asked me about "Big Data" problems that are non existent in the actual role.

Recruiter asked me to arrange my own travel with verbal promise of reimbursement. My tab came to close to a grand, and all attempts to request reimbursement fell on deaf ears. Recruiter did not acknowledge the receipts of my expenses (i.e. no replies by email, no returning phone calls). In this mood I arrived at the interview, with serious doubts about the integrity of this company, and less than 50% willingness to accept an offer if one was made. The hiring manager and the HR contact confirmed my doubts. First round showed me that technically the staff was years behind me in my area of specialization, yet the interviewers constantly tried to find something wrong with my answers. Attacks on my logic and reasoning were absent, and instead they focused on coding style and even handwriting. It seems this is a deliberate strategy they employ to test the patience of candidates. I felt a bit overqualified for the position because they happen to use only a subset of the features offered by the technology they interviewed me in, and even in that, they had multiple screwups. The person who greeted me informally chatted for a bit about a blunder someone had made that morning in saving data, and they were trying to fix it. I took the time to answer some technical difficulties they had encountered recently in their architecture. My impression was that they lacked sufficient working knowledge not only of the technology but also of hardware. It was a bit surprising, but I kept that to myself. Second round: they were not interested at all in my technical skills, instead grilled me for over 1.5 hours on behavioral questions and my shortcomings that went from mildly insulting to aggravating. Were clueless about where I would fit in. It seemed that the technical department was full of people from sales and marketing background who did enough to get by. They continued to imply that I lacked technical skills outside my area of expertise, and even that I lacked financial knowledge. Technology doesn't seem to be an important part of their strategy for success (as compared to other banks like BoFA/MS/ML/JPM etc.) IT department appears to exist like waiting staff in restaurants and all expectations are that newcomers will behave the same way.