I applied for the position of Senior Software Engineer – Distributed Systems, in Edinburgh. The first interview was an assessment, it was pleasant, after which I was recommended for the higher position of Principal Engineer. Based on that, they scheduled me for 2 interviews: 1 cultural, 1 technical. Cultural went ok; very pleasant. Technical interview was performed by a Senior Principal Engineer. Interview went mostly ok, but I felt the focus was too tied to their tech stack. There were two questions I could not answer satisfactorily during interview, I used Google afterwards and learned enough in 30 minutes that the second time around I could have passed. Asking such technical questions as a gateway for hiring an individual seems counter intuitive. Based on the recommendation from Senior Principal Engineer, they did not think I would be a good fit for Principal Engineer, but if I wanted to still proceed as Senior Software Engineer - Full Stack (again not the role I applied for), they would schedule me with 3 more technical and 1 more cultural interviews. In the back of my head I was getting yellow bulbs going off. 3 tech interviews (“Depth of Expertise”, “Hard Problem #1”, “Hard Problem #2”) were back-to-back hour long sessions. DoE evaluated my past experience through one of the problems I solved previously. HP1 focused on building a system to guard against bots. Both were dynamic conversations and pleasant; HP2 was not. Interviewer was visibly upset that the interview was not in person. How can he effectively interview over video? Without use of whiteboard? he asked. We ended up using whiteboard in my room. Before the interview started, interviewer was already passive-aggressive. Whole interview was contradictory. One second it was “complete the process to the end”, next it was “why are you making that choice right now, it's not scalable”. Well of course it's not scalable, you asked to complete the simplest possible scenario end to end. Why are you using that front-end library, I never heard of it. And that is how the whole interview went, constant barrage of contradictions. This interviewer has turned me off the company. Is this really who you want to represent your company values? To me that was a red flag. Second cultural interview was pleasant and went well. Nice dynamic conversation between two individuals. This interview restored some of my lost faith in the company. Not one interviewer in the second round was from Edinburgh. To be fair, interview process handler said that if they made me an offer, I could come to Edinburgh to meet the people at that time, before I accept the offer. Still I considered this to be another red flag. It’s not the same to be interviewed by the people you will be working with directly, and just meeting them as an afterthought. Feedback that I got was somewhat spot on, but there were couple of things that I completely disagreed with, they were absolute falsehoods. I feel like they were trying to come up with more reasons why not to make the offer aside from “lack of experience with scalability”. They claim that technology used does not matter, yet knowing right answers to specific technical questions in their tech stack is more important than cultural fit. Whether you can support 60 or 100 million monthly users will be pointless, if products are unusable or results are off the mark. Why would they expect every new Senior Engineer to be expert in scalability? Interviewing process was well organized and all interviewers were on time and professional. I truly enjoyed interviewing process, I got to learn few things along the way, about myself, and Skyscanner. Overall, I feel they are interviewing for the company they used to be, and not for one they need to be to succeed in the future. Search for "Commando, Infantry, Police", and read about it. In my opinion the company is using some Commandos to interview for Infantry, or worse for Police positions. They claim they are looking for a diverse group of people but they are hiring for a single technical/cultural fit. If they applied the current "cultural fit" to existing employees, they would have to fire a few people, as company outgrew them. My advice is hire some great Engineers that care more about end users than scalability. I wish Skyscanner luck as over time they will realize their hiring mistakes and adjust accordingly, or they will falter as good people start leaving the company because Commandos are still the heroes of the company as a whole. I am not saying that company should not have Commandos, but keep them focused on what they do best and away from the Infantry and Police. And expect to have multitude of sub-cultures within big company, and hire accordingly. Define your cultures more around people than technical know-how, which is not as important as an individual's ability to learn and adapt. Technology changes more rapidly than people.