This is a cautionary tale about what happens when corporate arrogance and empty ambition get a reality check. The interview process went smoothly up until the last panel interview, but ended in a fiasco.
tl;dr GetYourGuide expects quite a lot from candidates (which is fair) but fails to acknowledge the mutual nature of the assessment; once I peeked behind that facade, I discovered something truly disappointing.
Steps 1–4: The recruiter call, automated 90-minute tech screening on HackerRank, and two technical interviews (coding + system design) went really well. I received positive feedback and invitations to the next stage on the very same or the next day. My only concern was that across all these meetings, I had no more than 10 minutes in total for my questions. This didn’t really feel like a “conversation” (as the company frames it in the prep resources for candidates); seemed more like GetYourGuide trying to keep me from learning too much, too early. However, the interviewers left me with a good impression and no obvious red flags, so I decided to give GetYourGuide the benefit of the doubt.
Steps 5–7 were a round of three back-to-back interviews: “project retrospective” (for which you’re expected to prepare slides about one of your past projects, using the STAR technique), a conversation with a senior manager, and a panel interview with the hiring manager plus a couple of other stakeholders (sometimes from other teams). The first one went great (judging by the feedback and my own impressions); the second was okay (I didn’t get much clarity regarding long-term risk management, but these matters rarely impact engineers directly); but the third one uncovered a disaster.
In the panel interview, I was asked standard questions about giving and receiving feedback, contributing to the team culture, etc. The interviewers rarely interjected my answers, asked few clarifying questions, and seemed satisfied, leaving enough time for a few questions of my own. As you’ll see below, my questions came down to the same matters of team culture and work processes that I was asked about minutes earlier. In that light, the hiring manager’s inability to answer them was the most unpleasant sort of surprise. And given how much the company expects from candidates (the screening, the slides, the STAR technique, etc.), the hiring manager’s unpreparedness for the most obvious questions felt somewhat insulting. All that made joining this particular team a big no-no for me.
A couple days later, I got an “alignment” call with the recruiter; I mentioned that the interviews had given me lots to consider, but didn’t go into detail. A few more days later, the company decided not to extend an offer. In the call that followed, the recruiter quoted positive feedback for every aspect (technical skills, communication, product vision, business impact, team growth). The only reason for not extending an offer, according to the recruiter, was the hiring manager’s note about “insufficient examples of giving and receiving feedback”—which was really ironic, considering the HM’s own feedback examples that I got (the lack thereof).
Conclusion. I dodged a huge bullet by avoiding this particular position. I want to believe it was an exception to the rule, and the company’s other teams are organized and led better. However, GetYourGuide’s abuse of power dynamics (e.g. requiring lots of prep work from candidates while leaving only 15–20 minutes for their questions across 5+ hours of interviews) paints a grimmer picture.
