Very disorganized. Interviewers were very unprofessional, and hostile. They emailed me saying they are not moving forward with me then emailed me again the next day to schedule another call.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at CrowdStrike in Sept 2022
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter for a position related to macOS kernel programming.
While I had related experience in the past (years ago), I raised concerns about not having recent experience with this OS in particular, and me being a generalist and not a person that has focused in this OS and knows all its internals. I've developed for the Win/Linux/macOS kernel sporadically, but never focused on any or in kernel development in general.
The recruiter told me that this was exactly what they were looking for, and it would be unrealistic for them to look for experts in this field. He felt I was a strong candidate and was going to try to expedite the interview process.
After this, I had to basically chase them for a couple of weeks to see if we were proceeding or not, just to find out different people going on vacation and leaving the process hanging.
Eventually, I was interviewed by a recruiting manager that seemed more interested in my personal situation than on my qualifications for the job, or my background. On top of that he just threw at me a couple of very specific macOS questions about technologies/concepts added to the kernel in the recent years.
A complete waste of time. They should be on the same page in terms of what they're looking for.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at CrowdStrike
Interview
Was interviewed by engineers and managers from 2 different teams. The auth team and cloud engineering team. Had a few rounds with engineers from cloud engineering team and the team was very professional with their approach. The regular workout it LC based questions and queries on handling race conditions. Had another 2 rounds with the auth team one with an engineer and another was the final round with the manager. The one with the engineer was easily the worst interview i had to sit through. The engineer was dealing with some high sev issue and clearly had their hands full and was unable to concentrate on the interview. Despite me offering to reschedule if this was not a good time they went ahead with the interview which was medium level LC question that I am sure i got right. They had no comments on the code and just wanted to get of the call. The other round was with someone at higher levels from the auth team whose primary expectation seemed to be to find someone who would stretch without any questions. Should have the titled the role "Senior Slave Engineer".
On a personal level I would recommend AVOID the auth team at all costs. For the sane folks in that team my heart goes out to you. Culture within that team seems not so great.
Everything went very smoothly during the interview. After a brief introduction, we moved directly into the coding part, which was handled in a LeetCode-style format. There wasn’t much discussion beforehand, as the focus was primarily on problem-solving and implementation, making the process clear, structured, and efficient.
