I went through six rounds of interviews, plus a take home scripting project. The first two interview rounds were good, and I have nothing negative to say about those interviewers.
However, as the process continued, it became increasingly frustrating and disorganized. Later interviewers, including senior leadership, asked questions that felt disconnected from the role and sometimes showed a lack of clarity on the subjects being discussed.
For example, after mentioning my experience with ESXi and VMware, I was asked unrelated questions about CPU core architecture and how CPUs are designed, rather than questions relevant to virtualization. It is understandable if interviewers are not deeply familiar with ESXi, but the questions felt off topic and unnecessary.
while i was explaining network segregation i was also told that VLANs are unnecessary for network segmentation and that subnets alone are sufficient. While this may work in some scenarios, best practice in on prem environments especially when using physical firewalls is to use VLANs per subnet.
Regarding SAML, I was asked how SAML SSO works at a deep backend level after connecting an application using the protocol. When I tried to clarify whether they meant how to integrate applications or SaaS platforms with an IdP using SAML, I was told they wanted to know how SAML itself is architected internally. That expectation felt unreasonable for the role and not something typically required unless you are building the protocol itself.
Overall, the interview process became overly unrealistic , inconsistent, and a waste of time. Clearer role expectations, more relevant technical discussions, and better interviewer alignment would significantly improve the candidate experience.
