First contact from HR to describe my technical background and qualifications for the role. Second from the hiring manager to delve deeper. Third from two engineers with a live coding exercise that was fairly straightforward. After several days, I received a call from HR with the news that someone else had been selected for the role. Much appreciated and so much different from most other companies I've applied to where I received an impersonal email saying "we have decided not to move forward...".

So it started off with an email from one of their recruiters, from there I was scheduled a hiring manager interview. To be frank, the interview itself was a precursor to how everything would shake out. The HM was late, roughly 15/20 minutes give or take. I left after 15 minutes, then literally rejoined 10 minutes later _just_ to see if they would ever join. Lo and behold the HM was in the call. It was fairly typical, talk about myself, my experiences, find out about the role etc. Ok so a bit odd and disorganized but surely that's just a hiccup? After that it was two back to back technical interviews. Not leetcode, but more implementation. There was a SQL setup where you had to do some basic joins in postgres, then 'write a function that does X'. The next round was more or less the same, only just more in-depth. So far so good. The system design round was your typical setup. Hop on hellointerview and you'll know what it is right away. Truth be told, I thought perhaps regurgitating exactly what I knew the setup was supposed to be would make me look suspect, so I pretended to 'discover' some of the stuff but yeah, don't do that. Just dive in and yap away, everyone already knows we game leetcode and I guess system design is the same now. Then there was a cross functional setup, that was also more or less as expected. So far so good! The main issue was the fact that it took over 3 weeks to find out what exactly was going on. In those 3 weeks, I also interviewed at multiple different companies, got multiple offers, and even tried to communicated with Bestow with a few "hey! whats going on? dude i got an offer whats the hold up". TLDR, got down leveled, which I guess threw my application into flux, there was seemingly some confusion on their end in regards to _where_ I would be able to be slotted in. But to be totally honest, the entire thing took waaay too long. Legit from January 4th or so, to February 24th. I was legitimately interested in the role, I did also consider the down level seriously, but day after day, the entire process just made me question and wonder, if this portion is this disjointed and unorganized, how is the rest of the company? I appreciate the recruitment teams attempts are figuring out what the HM's are doing, but at the end of the day, you gotta make a decision.