I applied for a position in the San Francisco office, but they already had an offer out and the internal recruiter convinced me to interview for a position in the Provo, UT office which was actually local to me. I decided to explore the opportunity, although my interest in the position was not as high. Ancestry was very aggressive with their timeline and scheduled the phone screen with the department head right away, and then the in-person interviews as soon as we could all coordinate schedules. The phone interview went well and I became more intrigued with the position and agreed to come in and meet the team. That's where interest started to wane. The offices had the atmosphere of a church. There was no energy, little activity, and no character to the space. The business is thriving, but you would have never been able to guess that from the environment. The gentleman I would have reported to seemed competent and pleasant, but also showed a lack of understanding of the marketplace and general ecommerce principles. That wasn't a huge concern, except that he seemed to not know what he was looking for in the position. One of the following interviews was with a Project Manager. This was easily the most pointless interview I've ever had. She exhibited a huge amount of inflexibility in her understanding of agile development, and her follow-up questions clearly showed that she was not listening to my answers. She also had a very abrupt personality. The next two interviews went extremely well, but were filled with softball questions. Overall I got the impression that they lacked clear vision on how they would successfully build and launch the product. At the end of the day I told the Director of my poor impression of the PM and that I didn't think it was a good fit for me if she were to remain on the team. He seemed to understand my concerns. It then took a couple of weeks for them to make a decision and inform me that they didn't think I was the right cultural fit. I agreed wholeheartedly. They were mostly nice people, but largely inexperienced in ecommerce and software development. In addition, the pace and energy of the office would have sucked the life out of me.

Had an initial screening with a recruiter then was moved on to a hiring manager interview. The hiring manager interview involved behaviorals and a very straight forward product sense case. I bombed the case but he was really nice about it. They followed up with a rejection email.