Recently interviewed for Hubspot in Dublin for Senior Software Engineer. Process was straightforward. Screening call with a recruiter (who was very good). Take home technical assessment involving pulling and posting data to an API. Managed to complete this quite quickly (30 mins ish I think) but I think you are given 3 hours to do it if needed. Then the onsite interview. This was 2 system design interviews and 1 coding interview. Interviewers were pleasant. Questions were not overly difficult. Was able to finish athe 2 system designs and coding questions in a timely manner with good explanation and justifications etc for each thing. No noteworthy hiccups or even a second guess on amything. In my book the interviews had actually gone exceptional, much much better than I would have thought was a pass.
Was actually quite surprised to receive a rejection. Was able to request feedback and another call with recruiter scheduled (which is great as I am sure many companies dont offer specific feedback).
It kind of goes downhill from here. The specifics of the feedback was a bit frustrating and was a bit of a red flag to be honest. The feedback was mostly extremely benign things that youd never even consider pointing out to a candidate (one of the main feedbacks from the coding interview was not using getOrDefault for Java hashmap, instead opting to do it in 2 lines (I had actually originally pointed out that I preferred the 2 line solution in the interview to the interviewer and that I know it can be done in one line). Was very perplexed to see this was the points being used as make or break feedback. Some other points of feedback was spent too long explaining the time and space complexity of the solution rather than just stating what it was immediately (which is sort of the opposite of how you are typically expected to relay this info in interviews). There was other bits of feedback but they all sort of felt like mute points, or atleast things you'd purposely do in an interview setting.
These sort of points are quite orthogonal to the industry standard rubric of judging tech interviews (where you would be expected to over explain and take your time outlining your thoughts, and would typically not be nitpicking on code syntactical sugar choices). Sadly despite receiving specific feedback, there doesn't seem to be any actionable points, in the sense that if I did the interviews again, I'd do them the exact same even knowing the questions in advance because the feedback didnt really have anything to "improve" on in that sense. Felt a bit bad for the tectuiter because she obviously is just relaying the feedback and doesn't understand how propesteruous of feedback it actually is to give to a candidate. It's borderline telling the candidate you didn't pass because they didn't like your haircut sort of thing.
So all in all, good recruiter, good interview experience, but the rubric on which the interviews seem to be judged seems a bit of a broken process. Have taken a quick look on glassdoor post interview and have actually noticed similar cases of this and it seems it is accurate. I dont get the impression it is the specific interviewers to blame, but more so the style of rubric that they are told they must judge the interview by. Bit of a let down in the end considering how good the interviews went.
