Experience interviewing at Slack

Sharing this because I searched for information here when my interviews were approaching and didn’t find anything particularly useful. Brief personal background, currently leetcoding with a view to start interviewing at faang companies by like mid next year but I randomly came across an opening for senior frontend software engineer at slack, checked how well they pay on levels.fyi, not quite faang level but not too far off and definitely much better than what I currently earn (7 yoe, $115k salary). Also found out they don’t ask leetcode style questions so I applied in late September. a recruiter got in touch within a few days and we spoke briefly, typical phone screen asking about previous experience and explaining the new role, team etc. next step was an interview with the hiring manager Asked me to give dates I would be available, promptly gave dates for the following week but then she sent an email the next day saying the hiring manager was busy for the next two weeks and asked me to send over new dates, ignored her for two weeks but she sent an update email after the two weeks to see if I was still interested, so again, I gave dates for the following week, this time the interview got scheduled. Two days before the interview, I got an email saying the hiring manager was again no longer available but that I would speak with a senior staff software engineer, okay, whatever. Spoke to the her, she apologized on behalf of the hiring manager who was busy and the interview went smoothly, asked questions about my background and previous/current work experience, asked two specific technical questions, one about inheritance in javascript, another about frame rate in web browsers. Next step was a take home exercise, they sent a pull request on a GitHub repo with a basic javascript/react app and asked me to review it in two days, very much open ended. Completed it in less than a day and sent it back in. I hear back after a week from the recruiter, now the story is different, she explains the original team I applied for has filled the position but there is a frontend engineer role available on a different team, only difference is that this is no longer a senior position. Then she adds that I didn’t pass the take home interview at the level of a senior. Wasn’t too bothered about not being given a senior position because I am currently not a senior and even a lateral move to slack would still considerably increase my salary. The new team also sounded interesting so I agree to move to the “virtual onsite” stage of the interview 4 days later 4 interviews were scheduled, two technical, two behavioral. First interviewer didn’t show up on the zoom call for 10 mins, I sent an email to the recruiter informing them of the situation, the interviewer shows up and apologized saying she overslept, I actually kind of appreciated her honesty. The interview round was about code architecture and quality, she asked an open ended question about how to design the frontend of a chat application like slack, went alright. Second interview was slated to be about html, css and js, the interviewer asked me how I would load a 20gb image in a web browser, question caught me off guard but since it was open ended, I mumbled my way through, can’t say I nailed it but did okay, Third interview was about teamwork and collaboration, interviewer joined the zoom meeting on a phone call, so no video, gave some bizarre excuse for this, he was in a noisy background, dropped off the phone call at some point and rejoined again, just a total mess of an interview, but I kept my composure, he asked questions typical for interviews of this sort Last interview was with hiring manager, he joined like 5 minutes late, and didn’t really seem too interested in the interview to be honest, asked no meaningful questions and just seemed to want to chat casually. In hindsight, I feel like he already knew he would go with a different candidate, we didn’t even spend up to 30 minutes for what was scheduled to be a 45 minute interview. 3 days later, recruiter reaches out to me again saying this role had also been filled, but that there is yet another role she thinks I’ll be a good fit for, and that they don’t “want to lose a great candidate because of headcount issues”. at this point I’m of course slightly annoyed but the fact that they don’t just give a straight no and keep stringing me along amuses me enough to want to see where all this ends. They send the new job description, this time the new role is not really a frontend engineer role, even though that’s what is on the job title in the job description, it is more of a DevOps role with a focus on the frontend, essentially managing things like webpack, babel, build performance etc The catch is that now I need to do two additional “team fit” interviews. At this point the job description is not one I’m particularly interested and I’m pissed I have to do more interviews but you know what they say about sunk cost fallacy, I had come so far already, what difference does an additional two interviews make, I thought to myself, so again, within a week, I do the interviews, another two 45 mins interviews that both were kind of half technical, half soft skill. That was more than two weeks ago so i know i have been ghosted. not even a polite rejection email after 7 interviews. i thought of emailing the recruiter to ask for an update but my status has also already changed from “interviewing” to “no longer in consideration" on workday which they use for the recruitment process so i know they've moved on with another candidate. Anyway, goal is to continue leetcoding with a view to landing a job a tier 1 company by mid next year