The interview was mostly pleasant, and I found that the dev op team were fairly friendly for the most part although I had instances of them being rather short with me for no apparent reason. at an event and during the interview.
The interview process consisted of an interview with a member of the Dev Ops team to see how well I would fit with the team, alongside a HR rep. The interview was perfectly fine at this point and I felt I got on well with the team member and the HR rep until they got on to the topic of pregnancies. The engineer started rambling about how supportive they are of mothers (which is great) and talking about when I get pregnant as I became visibly uncomfortable as someone who doesn't want kids, has never wanted them and might not be able to have them, I had no idea how to respond in kind so the interview became progressively more awkward after that.
This was then directly followed by an interview with the CEO and CTO where they asked me personal questions and questions to test my technical knowledge. At one point I was asked a question about API calls by the CEO, and to explain them. As I was feeling rather nervous, (and uncomfortable from the conversation before) and I can be hard of hearing I asked the interviewer to repeat the question just to make sure I had heard correctly before answering. Once the question was repeated I looked down for all of 2-3 seconds to collect my thoughts, calm my nerves and think of a answer but was immediately dismissed by the CTO who exclaimed "Look, she doesn't even know the answer!" and laughed at me to the CEO, which of course made me feel very uncomfortable and upset. I did know the answer, I wasn't even given a chance to respond before the wrongful assumption was made. After this my confidence was completely rattled, and I was in a highly sensitive emotional state as I suffer from complex PTSD and one of the symptoms of that is extreme sensitivity to criticism or perceived mistreatment, and I definitely felt unfairly criticised and treated in that moment. It honestly made me wonder if this was coming from a place of misogyny/sexism as at this time there were no females on the dev op team, and I felt immediately dismissed whereas a male friend who interviewed here was treated with more respect although they declined the job ultimately . I ended up crying later in the interview which has absolutely never happened cause I was triggered and could feel that the interview was going horribly from this point on as I wasn't my normal self and able to answer the questions properly.
They seem like lovely people otherwise and I was really passionate about their company and their technology and really wanted to work there.
