Solicité el puesto en persona. Acudí a una entrevista en Datadog
Entrevista
The 1.5 month process started with several experience, personality and technical phone interviews and ended with a 4 hour on-site interview. After the on-site, I immediately sent a follow up email thanking the recruiter and the team. I received no response to the thank you email. No sweat, I know they are a busy company.
Following the thank you email, there was a 2 week period of silence from Datadog. No emails, no phone calls. After the first week, I followed up with the recruiter asking if the interviewing team has made a decision. I received no response. I waited another week and sent another follow up email. 30 minutes later, I received a call from a DD recruiter (a different one) letting me know I didn't get the job. The reason they gave for the delay is that they simply forgot to follow up with me.
Having applicants wait 2 weeks after an onsite, only to be declined is unacceptable for any self respecting recruitment team. A hiring team is the face of the organization, and showing such a lack of empathy is not a good look for any company.
The on-site interview consisted of a simple string parsing question, a standard system design question, and 2 behavioral interviews. I was expecting tougher technical questions, especially for a company that operates at their scale. The behavioral questions seemed as though they were picked randomly out of a hat, and did not seem applicable to the position of team lead.
Envié una solicitud electrónica. El proceso duró 1 semana. Acudí a una entrevista en Datadog en ago 2022
Entrevista
A Datadog recruiter wasted my time, unfortunately :(
I applied for a Team Lead role, remote position.
Got an invitation for a recruiter screen.
First, the recruiter told me that even though the job description said it was a remote job, they were only looking for people who are located in Dublin, because they want to be able to summon them to the office should they ever want to.
Secondly, she told me that they won't be able to proceed with the interview, because I don't have any management experience. (I don't have any formal management experience, but I've been an SWE for 10+ years and have mentored others).
I politely asked why she had invited me to the interview in the first place, since my CV clearly describes my experience.
She said it's because sometimes people don't read job descriptions carefully and don't know what they are applying for.
Honestly, this is the weirdest interview experience I've ever had. To be invited to the interview only to be told that they can't proceed with my application. An email would have sufficed.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Where are you located? Do you need visa sponsorship? Why did you decide to apply?
The process was relatively short.
After an initial conversation with the recruiter and a second conversation with the hiring manager the process officially began.
All in all, 5 ~1h interviews throughout 2 weeks. I was given the option of having live code interviews or a take home challenge.
Preguntas de entrevista [1]
Pregunta 1
Algorithmic questions about real-world use cases. Processing events and other data structures. Something close to the company's domain.
API design questions, in my case for mobile products.
The system design interview was also close to a use case within the company. Nothing too farfetched like design ticktock or design youtube.
More like design a piece of product X.
Solicité el puesto a través de un captador. Acudí a una entrevista en Datadog
Entrevista
They asked me to complete a take-home test to showcase my coding skills. They gave me no deadline.
I sent back the test a few days later after having spent about four hours on it.
Their feedback was that the test was great overall, showing clean code, the right choices and good testing. Nevertheless, they decided it wasn't enough, because of some minor flaws.
They literally said since we give no deadline, we expect the test to be perfect.
Basically, they were expecting me to spend weeks polishing a stupid take-home test like it was production-ready, taking that time away from my personal life and my family.
By the way, the requirements for the test were just sketched, so I wonder how they expect people to come up with a "production-ready" thing.
This is probably the stupidest feedback I ever had on a take-home test.