My first interview was with the recruiter, being asked the standard questions about my current job, my desired salary, and my overall job skills. That discussion was pleasant and made me feel good about the company. The recruiter quickly scheduled my first technical interview. This phone call took about 20-30 minutes. During the interview process the recruiter provided documents outlining the interview process and general expectations of each interview. My first official interview was a quick coding exercise using an online editor and zoom. I was able to pick the programming language. I was able to complete the assignment and had a good back and forth with the interviewer. They were nice and we had a good conversation during the process. The interview took about one (1) hour. I believe I did well during this interview since I was scheduled to go through about six (6) more hours of interviews. My second set of interviews was split into two (2) days. The first day consisted of another (more practical) coding exercise (1.5 hours) and a conversation with someone who would be outside of the team to discuss how my principles, motivations, and work style aligns to the company (30 minutes). I thought the coding exercise went well because I was able to finish the assignment within the allocated time. I made sure to call out what temporary implementations I used that I would not actually deploy to production and how I would refactor them to follow best practices. I stumbled a bit when I was asked about how to make my solution more efficient (big O), but I did not feel like I had any other major shortcomings. I talked to the recruiter after being turned down for the position and found out that because I did not immediately know specific patterns or syntax for certain tasks, they thought I was not strong enough with the language. During the interview I brought up the ways I would implement the solutions using other patterns in detail, but I guess that was not what they were looking for. I was consistently told "focus on finishing the assignment" and “feel free to use any resources (e.g. Google)”, which I did, so I am not really sure where I messed up. I did not like the second interview about the culture fit. The discussion started off well, with the interviewer asking me questions about my previous work experience and about me as a person. I was able to provide responses without much issue. I also tried to ask the interviewer about themselves because I prefer these kinds of interviews to be a conversation. But I soon started to feel uneasy because the interviewer did not ask many (if at all) clarifying questions about my responses; I usually like to give high-level answers to allow the interviewers to ask for more details. I do not want to take too much time on a single question if they have more to ask or want to focus on certain aspects of my responses. Then, the interviewer ran out of questions about 15-20 minutes into the interview, leaving me a lot of time to ask my own questions, which was a bit difficult since I had to come up with questions for someone who was not a technical contributor on the hiring team. After talking to the recruiter it seems like I was perceived as a neutral fit. I thought this interview was not coordinated well nor too helpful. Overall, the interview process was not bad. The recruiter was amazing and kept communication flowing better than most other people with whom I have worked. The first technical interview was pleasant and pretty standard. The second technical interview felt pretty great as well, but I did not complete the tasks in the expected way. And even though I think cultural fit interviews are REALLY important, I felt like this one was not done well. From what I could tell, it seemed like a good culture fit, but there must have been some misalignment that I did not recognize. If the technology and culture of the company sounds interesting, definitely apply. Seems like a great place to work. I just warn that there are about 7-8 hours of interviews, depending on the role, so if possible, I would recommend splitting them up as much as possible to keep fatigue to a minimum. Also make sure to be very vocal during your interviews and pressure the interviewers to communicate their thoughts to be able to understand what exactly they are looking for and expecting. I prefer interviews to be conversations where both parties are trying to understand each other, but this set of interviewers did not meet that criteria for me.