zscaler | Principal Engineer

Had another episode of interviewing with a bunch of incompetent folks. A non FAANG firm. I had talks with 4 senior folks.

Initially the position was mentioned as an Architect.

In a first discussion with the HM, he mentioned that it is now for a Principal Engineer (one level down). It was a red flag, but I still went ahead.

I got interview scheduled which mentioned Architect!!

The interviewers were all thinking that it was for Architect position.

The discussions went great, except for 2. One dude kept pushing me on why we are using rust for something like a control plane design. Even after mentioning multiple times that we evaluated all possibilities, and rust seemed best suited due to internal libraries and frameworks were already in rust, he was arrogant enough to say : “oh this will fail”, “this is designed for failure”, "this will not scale", without actually mentioning any reasoning behind those atrocious claims.

The other dude was supposed to take a behavioral interview. He joined 10 minutes late. And in the last 15 minutes, he jumped to “design uber”. I was surprised. I still did it pretty well.

A week went by, and they didn’t even bother to update me on anything. I mailed them asking if there’s an update. A dry reply comes “oh unfortunately it didn’t work out for Architect.” WTH, wasn’t it PE position anyway? Plus, you were expecting to just ghost me.

On interview content: they were pretty lame and very doable. There was nothing that I could have done better. I was very happy and satisfied with my answers.