Started delightful, ended abysmal. I clicked with my recruiter, great guy. On my 2nd or 3rd round I was to meet with the Hiring Manager (and his boss?) and told it would be a "mix of technical & personal" questions. About 5 minutes before, I get an email with technical requirements for sharing my screen etc. I was ambushed with a live coding assignment that was a custom problem specific to the quant financial domain (of which I have no experience), strangely worded, and Leetcode-style. I gave it my best but the tone & verbal/non-verbal communication from the interviewer was terrible, as was his direction and answers to my question. He told me "everything mattered". Just as one example: before I solved the gist of the problem, the guy instructed me to use a unit test framework for my tests. When I said I'd use whatever the codebase was using he said I could use the Python built-in lib, then instructed me to carefully read the documentation. It was a belittling, pedantic, micro-managey and absurd waste of my time. He also at one point told me to write a test for a non-negative value when I started writing one for a zero value. Then of course instructed me to go back and write the zero value test. The fact that this was the hiring manager made me decide I didn't want the job about 15 mins in. I didn't complain to the recruiter but let him know I was caught off guard, and now I've been ghosted.

Interview process was straightforward: 1. Call with recruiter 2. Call with Tech Lead 3. Final call with key team members The interviews themselves were great, and I was really impressed with the team and quality of work being produced. I labeled the process as negative due to the recruiter. I consistently communicated my salary requirements, and was essentially told the range was workable. However, when I received my offer, it was significantly below what I communicated. The recruiter was unprofessional in the process, and didn’t address any of my concerns that I would be taking a pay cut and significant risk in moving my family across the country. The whole attitude struck me as “you should be honored to work here” and frankly it really turned me off from ever working at the company. A shame because, as I mentioned, I think the team I interviewed with was stellar