Engineer Spends 5 Hours in Interview Loop With No Questions About the Actual Job

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A senior distributed systems engineer with 17 years of experience, including overseeing a major C-to-Go migration at Oracle's Dyn, recently completed a five-hour interview process for a role requiring exactly that background. Despite the position focusing on rewriting a core product from C into Rust and Go, the only technical question posed was a basic flood-fill grid puzzle unrelated to distributed systems. The candidate also faced identity verification steps — including showing government ID and holding up fingers on camera — introduced because the company's own recruiter acknowledged the screening tools were letting in AI-generated fake applicants. After the lengthy process, the candidate received an automated rejection with no explanation provided. The author argues this experience reflects a systemic industry problem, where applicant tracking systems optimized for keyword matching now inadvertently favor synthetic resumes while burdening genuine candidates with friction and opacity.

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