HR interview, asked about tools and technologies. Playstation uses Ansible, Terraform, AWS, java in backend, and react frontend. She wanted to see if I have experience with those tools etc.

Interview was with PlatStation FTG (future technologies group) for: Staff Software Engineer - Cloud Engineering. The interview process seemed fairly standard. I was contacted via LinkedIn and asked to interview. Things started off great with a recruiter chat (initial recruiter was amazing and very responsive), followed by a chat with the hiring manager. I think they typically do a tech screen before the chat with the hiring manager, but that was skipped for my interview. Then several video interview sessions where scheduled: coding; system design; behavioral. Scheduling was slow and did not seem to prioritize my time at all, I know I'm the one interviewing, but I imagine candidates would drop out just based on how long it took to schedule each part of the process. One interview was canceled at the last minute after I had already taken time off work. For the technical interview I was given no hints on how to prep, I studied with LeetCode but the actual interview was a systems programming question... For the design interview I asked what diagramming software they would use (again, in order to prepare) I was told ExcaliDraw so I practiced with that, but the interviewer decided to try the CoderPad.io diagramming tool (which is terrible and I was unfamiliar with it) -- we then switched to ExcaliDraw mid interview, which wasted a lot of time. For the behavioral interview the hiring manager just seemed to be reading off a list of Amazon behavioral interview questions and didn't really ask interesting or insightful follow-up questions. Finally, even though I was interviewing cold, all the interviews seemed to go well except for a somewhat rough technical interview... PlayStation then ghosted me after the interview process. I expected to at least hear that they where moving on to other candidates, but have not heard anything (more than 2 months later). Again, PlayStation asked me to interview when I was not actively interviewing and for which I took time off work in order to prep and attend their interviews. PlayStation then proceeded to fumble their interview process and now they can't be bothered with the most modest of professional courtesies to say "thanks for interviewing, but we're moving on to other candidates". I really liked the first recruiter I spoke with (Jin Wu) but will most likely never interview with PlayStation again.

Initial HR round, followed by interview with 2 hiring managers. HR pushed to do technical interview within 24 hours. After technical interview, I was notified that have been shortlisted for onsite, will let me know when other candidates interviewed. Its been a month since that feedback, and haven't heard back, HR says Hiring Manager still interviewing candidates.