I had cold-applied online for this position after seeing the job posted on a public forum. Tanium and I are not a good fit. Initial contact was excellent. The recruiting coordinator really impressed and did a good job of selling the company, speaking about it's pluses and where it was headed, and describing the interview process. Compensation for the role was made known on the first call, which was refreshing, and total compensation was above average. A Software Engineer's interview process involves the following steps: - Intro call - Culture fit and technical discussion call - 1st Skills Challenge - 2nd Skills Challenge - 3rd Skills Challenge - Optional 4th Skills Challenge - Full day on-site. (I received different hour totals between 5 and 8 hours) After the intro call, the second stage was an hour long 1:1 call with higher management in Engineering. The call was pleasant, interviewer was personable and easy to talk to. Overall an enjoyable conversation. Feedback was that perception of the call was mutual, and I was hopeful about the rest of the process, even given its length. Then come the skills challenges. This is really where the interview process breaks down and Tanium as a company is exposed. I made it to the third challenge. All 3 challenges were algorithm based, with only one being rooted in anything that might be practical day-to-day. 1st Challenge: The interviewer was distracted, disconnected, and did not seem to care about the interview. The interviewer was an alternate and was not the person I was originally scheduled with - something I was told was common. But the interviewer did not appear to want to be there. There was no collaboration nor conversation. The interview overall was very dry and uninteresting. The code challenge was mundane and unimaginative. 2nd Challenge: This was the outlier and sole positive experience with current engineers. The interviewer was animated, personable, warm, and genuinely seemed to want to be there and was engaged throughout the entire call. I did manage to solve the challenge but in a method different than what they were looking for. It was discussed at length and was a positive conversation. The interviewer appeared to have actually looked at my experience and other projects listed on my resume and spoke to that. A positive, solid experience that left me hoping it was the norm. 3rd Challenge: This code challenge was also mundane, which was extremely disappointing given the prior positive call and challenge. The challenge was to print the contents of a binary tree structure containing nodes which each had two child nodes. Admittedly, I had not seen a binary tree, nor worked with a similar structure to achieve the ask of the exercise, in well over a decade. When I made a comment to the interviewer to that effect, the response from the interviewer suggested that my memory retention should be such that I should recall it - off-putting and unnecessary. In my career I've seen many interviewers able to pivot to more accurately gauge ability, rather than to demand recall. The interviewer came across as myopic, distracted, impersonal, and abrasive. They wanted to mute while I worked on the challenge, to avoid interaction. I could not solve the challenge and asked the interviewer to walk me through the solution. They spoke so quickly I could not understand . This was not a person that I would want to work along side. It was not a positive experience and left me feeling awkward and uninterested. That Tanium would choose such a personality for a late-stage interview was surprising. I did not expect positive feedback and did not receive it. Had there been positive feedback I would not have opted to continue. I speak honestly and without sour grapes. I'm not enthusiastic about algorithms and don't commit to memory unused bits of info from decades past. Tanium is not interested in the ability to find and apply information to construct a solution. Some companies are just not a fit for certain people. My sense of Tanium outside of the recruiting department is unfortunately not very positive. Rather, very rigid, dogmatic, and bureaucratic organization locked into "Enterprise" methodology. This makes sense given their primary mission and client base. Tanium believes they have the formula for determining an individual's problem solving ability. But their interview process generally lacks imagination (with sole credit for any imagination going to the second challenge experience). This is veiled in a company line in which they "only seek the best engineers," but is quickly seen for what it is - a company which prefers engineers capable of regurgitation, rather than actual real-world experience. Tanium likes to bill the company culture as "startup in nature", but their vetting for entry into the walled garden is an interview process more akin to an undergrad Computer Science exam.