The longest and most confusing interview I have ever gone through. To set the stage, I was interviewing for an engineering manager position. I had one prescreening call with their recruiter to make sure I could string two sentences together. No problems there. At the end of the call, the recruiter told me there would be a programming prescreening call next. I would need to code up an algorithm using a shared screen session with a remote Qualtrics engineer. Seems a bit excessive for the position I'm applying for but okay. So the next week an engineer calls me and asks me to code up an algorithm that will traverse a directed acyclical graph (he didn't call it a DAG but that's what it was). I was an engineer for a long time but it's been a few years since I've done any serious coding. I managed to put together a recursive algorithm that would traverse the graph. It seemed to be overkill for the position I was applying for but I got through it so I was happy. I was thinking I proved to them that I'm technical so now we can move on to be interviewed for the actual manager position I applied for. They called me into the office for a 6 hour interview. That's right, 6 hours! So I go into the office and I am interviewed by 6 different people for an hour each. Many of them were very intelligent. I could tell because I'm good at assessing people after talking with them for an hour (having done hundreds of interviews myself). The problem is they asked all kinds of questions that were irrelevant to the position I'm applying for. I was asked architectural questions by a couple of people who wanted to get very specific about design. I was also asked to solve a statistical math problem which I wasn't able to do because I'm not a statistician. Also, a lot of other irrelevant questions. They did ask me some types of management questions but there weren't many of them. Another thing was I was interviewed by the person that would have been my boss and they said something that was very odd to me. They said the biggest part of being a manager was helping the employees with their career paths. So not team productivity, meeting commitments on time, code quality, retention or anything like that. Employee career paths! Sure that's a good thing but I'd hardly say it was the most important part about managing an engineering team. I also learned a great deal about Qualtrics by asking a lot of questions. Turns out Qualtrics has been taking on ex-Google and ex-Apple employees. But at the same time and despite their size, things are still very wild-west in engineering. Managers are expected to do other roles like coding, architecture, product management, etc. which I thought was weird because they also have people dedicated to those roles. So why are engineering managers expected to do them as well? If you've ever been a manager, you'll know it's very difficult to context switch from that to other things like programming. Living in both worlds is not fun. You either want to do one or the other so hearing that from them was very unattractive. Especially since they already have people supposedly dedicated to those roles. Confusing. Also each team has full reign on how to run their team, what technologies they use, how they implement testing, etc. As an engineer I would have thought that would been great until I was actually part of a company that did that and it resulted in a very disjointed software stack. It also makes it difficult for any one person to keep track of all the architectural details of other projects because of how they're all different. What language does that piece use? How is it configured? Where is the code repo? It's hard to remember it all. That's what happens when you have no standards across teams. Another downside is they have a completely open office layout with no office or cubicle walls of any kind. Only tables with workstations on them. A few people who interviewed me did admit they hated it, which I totally understood. Even the CEO who is one of the few in an office is enclosed in glass walls so people can see what he's doing from across the room. I guess that is literal transparency in management. So the take away is these guys are used to the hiring practices of much larger corporations like Google or Apple, but their engineering processes and delineation of roles are a bit infantile. In the end, they didn't make me an offer. Probably because I couldn't totally hide my irritation about how we talked so little about managing a team and so much about irrelevant things. No worries though, I had another offer already waiting for me that I took instead.