I applied to an open Senior Software Engineer position with Invitae.
The interview started with a phone call with a talent acquisition rep, who told me the pay band for the position was X, but if I do well in interviews, I can get X + 20k, which fell within my acceptable range, so I proceeded forward.
I had a really pleasant conversation with the hiring manager, and I could tell we'd be moving on to the next phase.
They gave me a GitHub repository to clone and set up environment for 24 hours before the interview, so I did that. The virtual onsite consisted of two technical coding interviews, involving the code and environment I set up, where I had to complete as many Trello tickets as possible, of which I completed 2. They told me that was excellent, and I could see everything was going very well based on their reactions all throughout the process.
I did notice that somewhere along the process the Senior Software Engineer position changed to Full Stack Engineer, without a word from anyone, so I let the hiring manager and the talent acquisition rep know that I am under the impression that I'm applying for a Senior Software Engineer position, and they confirmed that was the correct expectation.
The talent acquisition rep called that Thursday telling me that the team really liked me and that he's going to get an offer in writing, for X + 20k to X + 40k by Monday next week. Of course, I was excited about the process going so well...
... Until the talent acquisition rep called me on Monday and said "I'm so sorry this has never happened in my career. I went to the comp team and they will not let me raise the comp above X + 10k. I was stunned and asked WHY HE HAD BROUGHT UP a pay range like he did that prior Thursday? In fact, why had he led me on to apply if they never could meet my requirements? He kept apologizing and repeated that this has never happened in his career.
He came back one more time, and it got even worse! He said now the salary was back at X... So long story short, the talent acquisition rep was inept, led me on, and never had authority to raise the comp for the position, wasting my time and the hiring manager's time.
I've never experienced such a nightmarish interview process and declined the offer for X.
