Applied beginning of December 2024. Beginning of April (so 4 months later) got a message from a recruiter - was asked if I were interested in a different position, which was too junior for my taste: I have 25+ years of experience in quite different companies and fields, while the position was was for someone with a few years of experience.
I replied that it was not interesting. Asked what was the reason behind such a proposal, as I was interested to figure out what went wrong and how to prevent that in the future. The recruiter had a call with me, asked me some regular questions regarding my experience, then shared information about me with a couple of teams, one got interested, that hiring manager (director) scheduled a hour long Zoom call with me. The rest happened in 2 weeks from that.
The first interview looked good. It was a conversation regarding m,y experience, the project at Remitly and so on. While I didn't care much about the technical part of the project - it was doable, just nothing particularly exciting, - I liked what I saw in the director and what heard from him about the company and plans for the project. He decided to proceed, the next round of interviews got scheduled.
That round consisted of 4 one hour long "virtual onsite" Zoom calls over 2 days. 4 different interviewers (2 managers, 1 senior manager, 1 director (a different one)). All the interviews were going to be behavioral ones.
Behavioral interviews could be roughly of two types:
1. You are asked specific questions like "tell me about a time when..." and you are expected very specific answers.
2. The questions could be roughly the same, but the expectations are not to learn matching examples from your past, rather the questions are there to start a conversation on that topic - to see what you think about it.
One interview out of 4 was of the former type. A very formalistic one with questions like "tell me about a time where you received challenging feedback". This was the worst interview experience for me in years. The interviewer was not interested in lessons learned by me over years, was not interested in how I try to act in relevant cases. He wanted specific examples from my experience. When I gave him an example of receiving a feedback that was challenging and incorrect, the interviewer interrupted me and requested an example of me getting a correct challenging feedback. When I later, at the end of the interview, asked the interviewer about the interviews approach itself - if he had some rubrics he had to mark one way or another on his interview feedback - he refused to answer. Later, two other interviewers gladly talked to me in details about the procedure, so it was a personal choice of that specific manager not to discuss it.
After that interview I seriously considered sending a message to the recruiter about not willing to proceed. Because such formalistic behavioural interviews are not rare, so not surprising, but to me they demonstrate low quality of the process and of the interviewers, so I had no desire to work for a company organizing things like that.
The next 3 behavioural interviews were just incomparably better. While they had some regular behavioural questions, it was clear the interviewers were interested more in figuring me out than in following some script. I liked those interviews a lot and would have gladly worked with each of these interviewers.
Then I got a rejection. When I asked for feedback, I received:
- The interviewers didn't get details they were interested in. They felt my answers were not specific enough.
- The position requires working with many stakeholders and the interviewers didn't see in me enough of that experience.
Now, I understand that whatever I am, I can't satisfy everyone. The company and interviewers might have some criteria I do not match. I do not think I lack relevant experience, but fine.
What I consider a second big negative here is the part about the interviewers not getting details they were interested. I spent 5 hours (counting the call with the hiring manager) telling people everything relevant that was coming into my mind regarding topics they were interested in. If they wanted more details - they could have asked.
Also the hiring manager mentioned that his goal was to teach the next generation of engineers - something along those lines. Even if I am really lacking experience, I doubt it is so drastic that I am hopeless with regard of getting taught.
Remitly is still a mystery to me. It could be yet another corporate bureaucracy, it could be a great place to work for - I saw signs of both. I would have gladly worked with 4 out of 5 of my interviewers and it could have been useful to figure out why things went wrong with one.
But overall I now feel some nonsense and dishonesty there. Hence the negative rating.
