The interview process consisted of an HR screening, a technical manager deep dive, technical coding questions, and an on-site interview. The HR screening was primarily a resume walkthrough. The technical manager interview focused on a deeper discussion of my experience and past projects. The technical portion included four coding challenges, mostly around parsing and breaking words from a string containing spaces and special characters, plus one problem involving recursion over nested arrays. The on-site interview included what they call a “system design” exercise for a hotel booking system. However, this was not a traditional system design interview. The focus was primarily on coding the booking logic on a whiteboard rather than discussing scalability, load, or architecture. When I asked typical system design questions (for example, expected load), I was told those details were not relevant. The interview followed a very scripted format, so it’s best to be prepared to quickly outline a few database tables for the booking flow and move straight into implementing the logic on the whiteboard. This was followed by a casual coffee chat with one of the engineers, a product demo, and a final round with the VP, which was mostly an opportunity to ask questions.

The interview process was straightforward. The questions weren't particularly hard. To understand my criticism of the interview process, you would need to read the results from the Go Developer Survey 2024 H2. In it, Go developers identified inconsistent coding standards as their biggest challenge. The inconsistencies often come from people bringing in idioms from other languages. My knowledge of and experience with Go were explicitly not priorities during this interview process. I am concerned about other developers who join the team without knowing Go. They have no way of knowing if they like a language that has removed so many features many programmers have come to love.