I applied for this job two months and change before I was contacted. The excuse I was given was they had "paused hiring," but there were 51 open jobs on the website, which gave me pause. Nonetheless, I took the interview as the position sounded interesting. The first round was a zoom call with the hiring manager, followed by an impromptu call from the recruiter to discuss logistics, followed by a "take home" coding challenge, two technical interviews, and an interview with the VP of engineering. Though I enjoyed meeting with the hiring manager and I think she has a great head on her shoulders and said many of the right things about managing a team, the process for me left much to be desired. First, a company that has that many open positions that pauses hiring before end of calendar year in my experience is usually dealing with financial challenges, but the recruiter kept insisting they were growing and were financially healthy. They also did not disclose the salary range on the posting until I told them it was law where I lived, claiming "we weren't looking to hire in that locality specifically" as the reason they didn't list it, and that this was the only team being remote definitely signaled to me a weak remote work culture, lack of understanding of HR and Payroll laws, and just a general lack of transparency. Additionally with this being the only team remote at the company, though the recruiter claimed they wouldn't force an RTO when I asked, since they're an at-will employer that promise meant absolutely nothing, again signaling a lack of transparency and integrity. The coding challenge really rubbed me the wrong way. I usually don't do free work for companies, but it seemed like it was worth a shot since they had the decency to at least do a couple of rounds before forcing this on me. It turned out they setup an AWS environment that was incomplete based on the problem they were presenting (Designing a script that would write Route53 DNS records for instances in an autoscaling group to solve a mythical UDP load balancing limitation), not giving my credentials permissions to allow writing a Lambda role, there was actually no autoscaling group present, and the problem they were trying to solve was easily solvable using AWS' native load balancers. Though I took it seriously and put thought into making code that would be operational and redundant, the two SREs reviewing my code on a call with me gave very little feedback besides saying I approached the problem literally, and it was basically just me explaining the code to them for 45 minutes. When I called out I had put a license file on my work to prevent it from being used by the company for free, they said they "had never seen that before" despite being developer-heavy SREs. Throughout the interviews, I asked questions about their operational "principles" on their website, like how they would manage burnout with what they label "extreme ownership." I didn't really get a good answer, with the two other SREs saying there's been so much emphasis on going faster, they couldn't answer that but probably would have to soon. The final straw was, upon being rejected, getting no feedback because the company "does not provide interview feedback as a policy." All in all, I wasted 2+ hours writing code with them, plus the time in and scheduling interviews for nothing, and received no feedback on improving in the future.