Long but not dumbly hard, but apparently I didn't make the cut. Take home project test that I honestly should publish on Github but won't out of courtesy. There were 6 interviews and two recruiters involved in my process. The first interview was with my direct manager, and he was great, liked me, basically promised me I'd get the job. Second interview was with my skip manager, aka my bosses boss. He rushed to do my interview before going on vacation. He was in Europe and I'm not exactly sure where since he was remote as well. He seemed distant, uninterested in my jokes and attempts to break the ice, and I thought that toward the end of the hour long interview I had been talking too much. (He had a bearded axe proudly displayed on the wall behind him, and I brought it up but he quickly shut that down.) Aced all of the other interviews greatly except for that one, which was a deciding factor. Because I had passed the tests and impressed 5/6 and the second recruiter, I was promised to be followed up with and presented new opportunities as they became available in the next 8 months, but never heard from them again. One notable thing that I found annoying was that they were so focused on their own jobs they seemed to expect me to know all about their tool or how it was working behind the scenes, even though there is no way for me to even scratch the surface on something like that. Yes, some of them said the exact opposite, but specifically the skip manager seemed to be unimpressed or uninterested in my thoughts on the video game industry (the position was for a game-related monitoring software). In all of the cases, people seemed to expect me to impress them with ground that undoubtedly they had already covered. Not sure the reasoning behind that. It would be like going to a mechanic's shoppe where the guy just got done tuning up a lambo, and he wanted to ask you your thoughts on lambos, even though you lead with "never worked on a lambo before" ... Despite that, I received the debrief from the recruiter that all but that one skip manager liked me and thought I was a shoe-in. He was the only European, go figure. Take home assignment did not take "only a few hours" because there were a number of bullet points, instead it took me about 24 hours over 3 days to complete to what I felt would be 100% satisfaction. I guess it was 100% complete but that didn't pay off. I was the oldest person out of all people involved in hiring by at least 5 years.

The process is long, but I was accompanied by the HR recruiter, which was very helpful explaining the process and expectations. I reached the end of the process, but did not receive an offer. The process includes LLM design, live coding, AI assisted coding, Backend system design, experience & values. The hiring bar is high, prep well and do your best!! In the worst case, you will learn more :)