The interview process consisted of three rounds: one HR interview and two semi-technical interviews.
The first round with HR went reasonably well. It was relaxed and covered the usual topics around experience. The interviewer seemed approachable and less corporate, which can be positive, but also tended to downplay the next stages and move quickly toward connecting me with other colleagues. While not negative, it felt unstructured.
The second interview was with someone presented as a QA Architect. I understand that interviews are asymmetric by nature, but this one stood out because there was very little interaction. The limited interaction made it difficult to assess his technical perspective or establish any meaningful alignment. The technologies I discussed appeared unfamiliar to him, which is not an issue in itself, but it made the conversation one sided. There was no sense of shared technical depth.
The third interview followed a similar pattern and was even shorter. Again, there was a lack of depth and dialogue. The format left little room for exploration of answers. Expectations were never clearly defined, neither beforehand in the process nor at the start of the interview. It was unclear whether they were looking for business-level answers, high-level system thinking, or deep technical detail. One of them even asked me at the beginning what questions I had about the project, yet they were unable to explain the actual business flow, the core purpose of what the platform is meant to do for the business. This lack of framing created ambiguity around what they actually wanted to evaluate.
On its own, this could simply indicate an organization that hasn’t fully clarified its needs yet, or that is moving quickly through candidates. That’s not necessarily a problem.
The bigger issue was how feedback was handled. It arrived a week later than the timeline explicitly stated during the interview. While delays happen, clearly committing to a date and then going silent reflects poorly on professionalism.
More importantly, the content of the feedback itself was weak and, in some cases, unfair. It included confident judgments in areas they did not demonstrate an understanding of during the interviews, such as proactivity, communication with business stakeholders, and the ability to motivate people. Commenting on proactivity while missing the stated feedback timeline felt contradictory. Interviews offer a very small window to connect with a candidate. In this case, that connection was largely absent. While I wouldn’t criticize them for not being deeply technical or domain experts, the way the feedback was delivered was assertive, superficial, and dismissive, which was disappointing.
Overall, the experience reinforced a pattern I’ve observed in parts of the outsourcing industry: individuals tasked with evaluating technologies they have limited exposure to, yet making confident assessments without exploring them in depth. In such contexts, nuance in QA discussions is often lost.
I’d rate the process a 6.5 out of 10.
