Awful interview/recruitment experience with Databricks
I haven't updated Blind in a while, went from JPMorgan to Google a couple of years ago. Databricks was one of the worst interview processes I've had. Initially scouted by a hiring manager on LinkedIn, had a great initial screen and he told me that I'd hear from a recruiter by the end of the week. They ghosted me for a month, turns out the recruiter was emailing the wrong email address. No response from the hiring manager emailing twice, after a week and then after 2 weeks, asking for a status update. Then when the recruiter finally got in touch, he called me a very unprofessional nickname on our first screen call, likening my name to a beer brand. Something I'd expect from a college drinking buddy, not a stranger in a professional setting. My interviewer wasted a full half of my hour for a technical problem going through trivial examples at a glacial pace even though I tried to explain that I understood. I'm not exaggerating, I was watching the clock with increasing stress and wasn't able to start writing code until exactly 1:30 in a 1-2pm interview. She was a new-grad and I'm mid to senior with deep experience in Python, and she didn't know some basic Python features. I wrote a working solution with test cases that passed and gave expected output, but she insisted there was a bug in my code and I had to spend 5-10 minutes explaining to her how heaps work in Python and how there was not a bug. Then with 3 minutes left she hit me with a part 2, I stated an optimal solution but of course didn't have time to implement. Got the rejection email today, not much I can do but laugh about it. One of the sloppiest and most bush league interview processes I've ever had. #databricks #tech #engineering #software #swe #interview
Hey, sorry for your bad experience, I just read your post and it is crazy… the only thing I can say is that it’s absolutely not like this in my org. Can you send back a feedback email to the hm with your feedback ?
I would, but the hiring manager hasn't replied in a month since I tried to get in touch when I thought I was being ghosted. I'm sure it's better in your org and that experiences like this are more of the exception than the rule, but I still think it's important to share in case others have had similar experiences. Prior to this I'd heard mostly good things about Databricks, but the one friend who interviewed with them also had a bad experience -- got an offer but they down-leveled him to L3 when he was a 4 at a FAANG company.
This is absolutely not the norm in my experience too. I'm sorry this happened to you. Sounds like your interviewer was inexperienced and probably ill equipped to interview a more senior engineer. This actually happened to me before at a previous company where it became apparent that the candidate knew more than me, so I took it as an additional positive point.
Yeah, I would have hoped for a more charitable interpretation from the interviewer, as well as some self-awareness about the amount of time that I lost having to explain how Python heapq works. It's a bummer that there weren't any controls on this. A part of me wants to follow up with the recruiter, I was excited about Databricks and it's frustrating to have this taken off of the table for reasons that were largely out of my control. Unfortunately, it's too late now for it to sync up with offers from my other final rounds if I were to get a redo of the phone technical, so probably not worth it when I'll go with somewhere else regardless.
The industry is saturated with "fake it till you make it". This applies even to "Big Tech".
Lol to hell with Databricks, recruiters and interviewers here thrive on giving false hope and misleading information. Waste of time interviewing with this trash company
this is hilarious
Lol yup, I don't know how else to look at it. This is how it goes sometimes.