What a gargantuan let down this was. In total, there were 6 hours of interviews, between recruiter, three technical phases (Q&A, pair programming , systems design) and a final chat with the Director of Engineering. Throughout the process, whatever explicit feedback I got went from positive to emphatically enthusiastic. I was informed I was being moved forward about an hour after the pair programming stage. For the final 30min chat, the preparation guidelines said to think about my goals at the company, look over the company values to determine whether we're a fit and to be ready to exchange experiences. This was the most casual and seemingly random phase of the process. The Director of Engineering asked me to describe myself in a minute outside of my professional self, asked about a book or article I read that made me think, why I chose to live in the neighborhood I do, what I like to do in my free time, what would make me consider a year at TravelPerk a success should I be hired, and allowed me to ask a few questions, at which point I asked about how the company defines their roadmap and next products to work on, how they deal with conflict inside the company, how they would determine whether my first year was a success etc. Very conversational. 2 days later, I received a capitalized NO, saying I displayed 'very strong cultural fit' and 'great skills' but no product mindset, which is what they look for in a senior engineer. I cannot fathom how such a seemingly strong yes turns into a firm no, as opposed to, at the very least, something like 'we were considering you for level X, but we think you'd fit better at level Y if you're interested'. Logically, such a change would have to be due to something irredeemable being uncovered during this final talk, which I know cannot have been the case, since I was there, and I know I didn't reveal anything damning when answering what I do on the weekends. The whole thing seems to me like it came down to an utterly arbitrary vibe check, or perhaps that the decision had been made before I even joined the call, as there is no way someone can have assessed my lack of product mentality by asking such mundane questions. I'd argue that by asking about the company roadmap and saying I want to work creatively and build things the best possible way and passing a systems design interview would all be testaments to such product mindset. I pressed for more feedback and got what I believe is more vagueness and contradiction (my strengths point out I gathered requirements and my weaknesses say I didn't do it enough). It was also said I need to focus more on user experience. Again, when was this assessed? If I passed the technical phase, how was this gauged during a chat about a book I read? And during the system design interview, I talked about predictive caching to improve the user experience, I mentioned we should keep the user informed about how fresh the data was. Where is this feedback coming from? Subjective selection processes are a waste of everyone's time.