Was not looking when I got cold-approached by their in-house recruiter for a role on the Confluent Cloud team (Kafka as a Service on top of Kubernetes). Was enthusiastic in the beginning since I used their products in the past and enjoyed reading their blogs and books. The company hires top talent in marketing and PM; they seem very open and are constantly pushing the envelope of building out their data-centric platform. The idea of using Kafka as a central nervous system in large scale systems resonates with many. In hindsight wish I paid more attention to some feedback presented here on GD and superficial pontifications by certain team members on Medium, LinkedIn. Anyone who states they were among “300+ applicants for a job and won” deserves an independent opinion on their sanity :-) Do your research and make sure you are well aware of these online personas. Interview process consists of: a) phone screen with recruiter b) phone screen with hiring manager c) take home code assignment d) take home design assignment to present in person e) in person/zoom in Palo Alto, CA and possibly other stages. Would recommend against spending much time on the take home and instead ask for a technical zoom chat before you fly out, that is if your time is important to you. Will post the take home stuff on Github to save you some time. :-) Nice office with a subtle millennial vibe (rooms called IMHO, TLDR, IRL, etc). Okay. Met most of the team in person at the office or over zoom. On the surface everyone seems to be genuinely nice, polite and technically capable based on questions asked. Some folks appear to be roughly 8-10 years younger then I am, so there’s likely not a lot of relatable experience. Most have a track record of working for successful web companies in the valley which is great for what they are doing. Nobody seems to have had to experience the need to change direction in their career quite yet. Or maybe made better career choices, that happens. :-) In person/zoom meetings are well organized. A person from a different team took me to lunch and it was a great experience, good to get a different perspective from someone who was with the company from the very start, super insightful conversation. I don't think I aced the interview but I don't think I flunked it either. Hard to tell since there wasn’t an immediate reaction, should I notice - I would have tried to correct. Recruiter’s verdict did not get into any detail and that wiped the entire experience. In terms of what questions to expect. They don't seem to be super hard core into sysdev, so no nasty concurrency stuff (like RW locks, condvars, Java thread pools, or tricks with go routines, or god forbid RxJava). There were also no brain teasers, no distributed systems fu like replication, consensus. No deep Kubernetes or AWS poking and no streaming problems which surprised me. Pretty much all around building vanilla web API and a basic problem of LRU. Over a week passed with no feedback, dead silence. Sent a friendly ping, got an opaque response that ended in “ufortunately, we are looking for someone to join the team who has more coding experience, from a design, planning and implementing perspective.” (this spelling verbatim). To translate this into hipster speak: “bro, do you even code?” :-) Since this blanket statement lacks any specificity - my suggestion: Don’t do it - it makes you sound quite dumb given the company caliber. Comes across pretty offensive as well. I just happen to have a good sense of humor :-) A couple of conclusions: a) Recruiter is pretty careless and does not really know how to handle rejections. Good rejections are an art to make the applicant feel good and be willing to come back. Nothing of that here. Not keeping it not open ended means not caring for building the network. Indeed, why network with a complete failure on a different coast? :-) b) The process is not optimal for an early pass. Maybe come up with a different way to filter out based on take home? Pretty much a waste of everyone's time otherwise. c) You need to be a cool kid / tech bro ninja rockstar to qualify. If you don’t exude "I am living on github 24/7”, maybe don't apply? Difference of experiences, views, career paths, curiosity - do not seem to matter here. Given this attitude, maybe hire friends of rockstars through referrals and do no outside recruiting? Lastly, the point about the "300+ applicants winner” blogger hero. Relieved I don’t have to figure that out and don't need to look further into team dynamics. Would be bad if there’s even a small chance that these concerns are true. Not looking forward to any toxicity, had enough in the past. Bottom line: do your research, proceed with caution, cap your time, and finally it’s OK to be an OK developer :-) But remember: "You miss 100% of shots you don’t take." So good luck!