1. Meeting with HR. A regular HR interview where they also tried to assess my English level. It was quite funny that an HFT company with Russian roots tried to convince me I would be subject to a non‑compete, even though Russian law does not support it. At the interview stage they somehow could not even name the term of the non‑compete, referring to an NDA, which seemed very strange to me. I said that I was willing to sign a non‑compete after the probation period, because even at that stage the company already seemed weird and sketchy to me.
2. Meeting with the Development Manager. At this meeting I was asked about my projects and what challenges I had solved. I found myself in situations where I did not understand whether I was supposed to go deep into the technical side. At some point I asked the interviewer why this interview looked like a technical one and whether I should go into details. I was told that I was just unlucky because the interviewer had graduated from some technical university. They tried to catch me on mistakes while making silly mistakes themselves. It seems that many people in the company think they are lucky to be in a technically savvy environment, but some of them are just posers. For example, the interviewer compared Docker with chroot and asked how they differ. Docker is the name of a company whose engine, runc, implements containers that rely on a set of isolation mechanisms, whereas chroot is a system call that provides pseudo‑isolation at the level of a process’s filesystem visibility. It is incorrect to ask for the difference between these two entities. It would have been correct to ask about the difference between the pivot_root and chroot mechanisms.
The funniest part came later. Two weeks later they sent me an email saying that I was not a fit for the company. And the funniest thing was that they offered feedback from the Head of Recruitment, who does not take any part in the interview lifecycle at all. They are ready to spend 15 minutes of a person who is supposed to focus on more strategic tasks just to talk to every rejected candidate. It seems there are issues with critical evaluation of processes in the company.
In the end, things became even more absurd. I scheduled a meeting with the Head of Recruitment, but he never showed up, or the link was broken. No one reached out to me about it, so it is hard not to assume he never actually planned to attend.
That evening I decided to track him down myself using OSINT tools and Google dorks. I found his Telegram and contacted him directly.
He told me that he had joined the meeting, had not seen me there, and then left. Funny enough, about twenty minutes later the recruiter messaged me: “Has our Head of Recruitment reached out to you? He was supposed to”. Implying that he was supposedly the one who should have messaged me himself. They turned it into some damn show, trying to convince me that they were genuinely concerned about giving me feedback.
His exact message was along the lines of: “What I wanted to say is that, as we warned, we are unfortunately not ready to share the details, but I wanted to personally tell you that we have an excellent impression of you, yet for the current role we understand that we will not be able to make an offer based on technical skills.”
In my view, people in this company are so incompetent that they even hide their feedback on a candidate’s technical skills behind an NDA. It is simply ridiculous and disrespectful towards candidates, and I would not recommend dealing with them to anyone
I hope that my experience and the way I caught them off guard will help many people
