I applied for multiple positions and engaged with some recruiters there. Suprisingly every single of them showed something highly in common: they started the process very positively, but all the sudden they just stopped to respond, no update, no Email reply, no answer phone calls, nothing. Compared to this, the no show of interviewer seemed a minor issue there.

My interview experience with Palo Alto Networks in September was highly unprofessional. The interviewer displayed a critical and apathetic attitude throughout the session. Instead of focusing on my qualifications, he repeatedly criticized my tech stack and career path, making inappropriate personal remarks questioning my employment stability and choices over the past three years. He appeared distracted and disengaged, showing little interest in my answers or technical follow-up questions. The experience was made worse when he inappropriately began speaking to me in Marathi after realizing I spoke the language, further demonstrating a lack of professional boundaries.

I interviewed for a role in the DLP team. I was to come to the office for 4 rounds of interviews after HM screening. I had a coding round which was by far the worst I had in a long time. The question wasn't hard. The interviewer had allocated 20 minutes for coding but first 10 was spent doing the following: 1. He asked me to join the zoom link in the meeting invite. There was no zoom link. 2. He then asked me to join the coding link. The coding link didn't have any way for interviewees to join. He then asked me to use an IDE to use and asked me to screen share. He had a solution in mind that he wanted me to implement. I wanted to think about evaluating pros and cons of multiple solutions. After all this is a principal role and not a junior SDE. As I was implementing my solution, he kept interrupting me to give feedback every 2 lines of code and also kept harassing me to finish the implementation within 20 minutes as he had only allocated 20 minutes for coding. At the 40 minute mark, we went on to the second part which is to write a SQL query. The query involved using a CASE, LEFT JOIN and a UNION. I proposed the solution on how to construct it but he complained that the syntax of the CASE and the LEFT JOIN were not correct. Afterwards, he was supposed to take me to lunch and he forgets to order my food. I have no idea how organizations allow characters like this to represent the org to candidates. Horrible, horrible experience!