Extremely poor interview process.
1. First round of interview was with a member of the Zepplin team. it went well. he showed the demo of the product. I got through
2. General problem solving round with a member of the Zepplin team. asked to solve a code on Collabedit. The interviewer was impressed by the working solution. he asked how HDFS is implemented, this is something i did not have experience in but tried to work out the solution.
at this point i was told that i will be having 3 MORE rounds of interview only
3. onsite F2F interviews with the GM, engineering manager and a senior developer. all 3 rounds were good, was asked design questions and general distributed system problems. was able to do well and clear the rounds. they said after the interview that i will be having another round with the hiring manager from US. on a monday. but the next day i was told that there will be additional round of interview. so totally 2 more rounds(monday and tuesday)
4. the 6th and the 7th round were both technical and was asked algorithm questions. was able to answer them and get past this round. i was told by the interviewer that they will let me know the numbers by the end of the week. I had couple of WELL PAYING offers already in hand but since i was interested in Hortonworks, i decided to wait. but the other offers expired within the next 3 days
5. No response in that week i decided to call the next week and they asked me for one more week saying they are evaluating 2 more candidates. i decided to wait still. post that week, i had to call them and they said zepplin does not have opening anymore for software developer and asked me to take two more rounds of interview with the YARN team.
i was frustrated with this already. but still i decided to take it up and did make it through the rounds, it was onsite and i was asked an algorithm question, a design question, a couple CSS issue, product design and UX, in the actual product related to the yarn data OS ui.
i was told again i will be informed in a week's time but was never contacted and i had to contact and ask them. They yet again asked for more time and a deadline was given.
This time also i was not contacted and my frustration had deepened. I called them one final time and they said we are not doing recruitment anymore.
This is extremely unprofessional and unethical. Interviewing is a very draining task and upon this the frustration causes pain.
I expect the management to take this seriously and fix the process. It is always very good to say an early no than to make a candidate wait and lose other opportunities. be professional and considerate.