1. Call with the recruiter for introductions and role briefing. 2. Call with the technical staff to showcase your work, a project where you contributed most at and discussion regarding your past experience. 3. Hiring manager round, where there is discussion around your ways of working, expectations on the next role and questions regarding your way of making judgements. 4. A take home case study. 5. An onsite interview where you have to present that case study , walk through the process of doing it and architectural discussion, followed by an extension of your code that you have to do live with the interviewers. 6. After the onsite round they take you to lunch. I went through all the rounds, got positive feedback on technical assessments and culture after each round, only to get rejected after the last round with a feedback that suggested "My style of kotlin does not match that of the company's. They wanted it functional. I used AI for a simple task, I struggled getting AI generated code to work, and I interrupted 2 of the interviewers in 2 different conversations" My story: 1. I presented a full blown production ready project in the second call with the technical staff. It included Rest APIs, database interactions through ORMS, db migrations fully functional, custom exception handling, unit and integration tests, 100% test case coverage requirement on service layer and 80% on the rest of the code, and demonstrative CI/CD flow through github push actions that compiled, ran tests and pushed to GHCR. I even implemented a whole kotlin coroutines based api to demonstrate a workflow I had worked on in a previous company on kotlin coroutines. This is because there was a requirement for kotlin coroutines. -> Got a positive feedback here. 3. Hiring manager round was not as technical so it went by easy. 4. I implemented the case study properly, structured code in a simple manner, and documented the complete implementation from 0-1 with screenshots of steps taken and additional documentation on how and in what ways the code can evolve and how deployment and scaling should look like. One day before the onsite round, I was told by the recruiter to use Cursor or claude during the code extension exercise as they are an AI forward company and not using AI could get me judged. I was also told to focus on dialog and minimise monolog and to be collaborative. In the onsite round, the presentation went nicely without any problems, I answered everything they asked, showcased all that I had done. I was then asked to extend the code and fetch expiry from the jwt token. I decided to make use of Cursor to do that because I did not have it memorised how that fetch would work in the syntax. Then they asked me to compare the current timestamp with the expiry to see which is bigger, and here i had to bring the expiry and the current timestamp in the same format so they can be comparable , here I took a few extra minutes to figure it out and get it working, the principle engineer who was coding with me on that piece was giving me instructions on what to do next, so I followed along and we got it working. They then invited me to the lunch and there was casual conversation mixed with technical discussion. So basically after presenting a production ready kotlin service with tests fully working, demonstrative coroutine workflow, and a whole case study that was fully working through integration test. I was told I can not be considered for a senior role, because my kotlin style doesn't match and that I cant compare dates without googling/cursor-ing, and extracting jwt expiry is too simple a thing to ask cursor. And then for a fact that the interviewer felt interrupted in a "pairing" round with 2 people involved in writing code. And this is when i completely followed his lead given his enthusiasm in the session, and might have only stopped when i didn't understand correctly. And also that I was advised to make use of cursor - but they had an opinion on how much and when. Oh and I couldn't be considered for a mid level role even because I couldn't bring timestamps to the same format to compare. Here the nuance to remember is that the judgement is around "I couldnt" and not around "I decided not to spend time on it given the time constraints and the fact that it was allowed to use AI". Faith in judgement making ethics just evaporated out of me after this.