I applied online and recruiter emailed me that the hiring team is interested in my candidacy. The hiring manager and a senior developer who will take my phone interview, were marked in the Cc of that email sent by the recruiter. I was very excited and asked the Senior Developer to schedule the phone interview ASAP (mistake). I got a call scheduled 5 days later and it was 60 minutes talk on the phone, I was literally sweating from head to toe. It was not that difficult, but he asked me about some of my academic projects which I was not prepared for and posed a system design challenge, I am sure I didn't give him the answer he wanted. He phrased the question in 5-6 different ways, still not satisfied with my answer. Kudos to his patience. Finally we ended the call and he said the recruiter will get back to me soon. A week later, recruiter emails me saying the hiring team wants to fly me to Seattle for onsite interview. I replied saying I am ready to fly as early as possible (MISTAKE) and I was given the date of last Monday of August month. It was exactly 7 days from the day I got this email. My interview started at 11:30, the interviewer asked me couple of very simple Data structure questions and I wrote the code on white board, while thinking out loud. After interacting for an hour, we went to cafeteria. Then he brought me back to the building after finishing eating and left me at the next interviewer's office. This person was very honest and told me that I'm the first guy he's interviewing. He had couple of CPP pointer related problems ready on white board and one SQL question. I struggled a bit in solving them, the interviewer helped me a lot. After one hour, I was left at the office of the team manager. She was very sweet and friendly. Talked for 20 minutes about mutual interests and jumped to system design questions. I wasn't able to cover all the scenarios, but talked about the important ones which did matter. She helped me to understand the rest. Then for my surprise, she said her manager might wanna meet me and dropped me off at the lobby and told me I had 30 mins break. After 30 mins, the senior manager took me to her office and it was all about how much I wanna do the stuffs which they are working on and behavioral questions and again a system design question. It was all good and easy to be honest. I sent an email to the recruiter, asking him to thank the team on my behalf. 3 days later, I got an email from the recruiter saying I don't have the required years of experience for the job role and that is the reason hiring manager has decided not to move forward with my candidacy.