I was very excited to interview with this company, but after I went through the interview process, my perception was a complete 180 degrees. The interviewer called me 10 minutes late. During the interview he was texting and smirking at his phone. It felt pretty rushed; as if he needed to get off the phone. I initially thought it was a good thing that interview went so fast because it seemed like a simple formality. The interviewer was relatively polite, but also came off as condescending at certain times. I’m pretty positive I had much more experience than him. He asked some questions that I thought were a little silly and kind of caught me off guard. One in particular was “what kind of tools do you use?” I was a little dumbfounded because I’ve worked with so many tools and typically write my own. And, for the level of job I was interviewing for, it was a little mundane; comparable to asking a CEO what his favorite parking spot is. Without any context, I wasn’t sure how to answer a simplistic question like that. Definitely a lack of interviewing experience on my part. I thought I was interviewing for a red team position. Turns out it was just a pen test/exploit dev position and not an actual “red team” position. I honestly don’t think the company knows what “red teams” are; they just named themselves/the position that because it’s a cliche industry term coined by, and associated with, the military that sounds mysterious and exciting. I didn’t end up even getting to the second stage, which really confused me. I know I didn’t answer some of the questions as good as I could have, but my mind was boggled at how he reached that conclusion in not even a half hour. This prompted me to get feedback from the interview. Most companies I’ve interviewed with—the good ones at least—gave me constructive feedback as a courtesy. All this company did was resend the last email they sent me; like I’m incompetent and couldn’t comprehend it the first time. So, from the interviewer, to how these guys handled the interview process and how they sold themselves, completely turned me off. And all of that resonates with me as they’re not anything close to what they portray themselves to be.