Recruiter reached out to me and explained the interview process which is hiring manager round followed by two behavioral and two system design rounds presentation. Well, one round become heckling by an interview. I never experience heckling in interview before.

The conversation started with a recruiter reaching out to me on LinkedIn for an SDE V position. Got all the interviews scheduled at once to "expedite" the process. While the interviews itself was plagued with technical issues due to interviewers showing up late or expired Zoom links being shared as part of two reschedules, I'm not going to focus on that for this review. After the interviews were complete, the recruiter reached out to me with a verbal offer for an SDE IV position. When I asked the reason for the downlevel, there was no justification on their end beyond insinuating that they bring all new seasoned engineers in on a IV level by dangling their quarterly promotion cycle as a carrot which sounded off to me. During the process of giving me the verbal offer, the first offer presented to me was deemed to be "best and final" effectively not even encouraging potential negotiation which is another concern for me. Finally, a day after my verbal offer, I asked to speak with my hiring manager to get more clarity on which interview panel decided on my leveling since all my interview panels other than the coding and sys design round were general behavioral rounds. I did not get a straight answer here either with them citing that they will uplevel the engineers rapidly citing the quarterly promo cycles as well. Another non-answer. A day after the conversation with the hiring manager, the recruiter reached out to me to say that they forgot another step of the interview (not surprising given how the entire interview experience has been so far) which was a conversation with the CTO for candidates who are in the offer stage. This CTO conversation was another pseudo interview (which was not specified to me beforehand) and a day after I finished, the recruiter reached out to me saying that I don't have the verbal offer anymore since the team has decided to go "a completely different way". I'd like to think I dodged a bullet here given that they seem to be mass hiring at the lower end of the bar and signed another offer with a company that respected my time and was more transparent about dodgy leveling and car salesman type compensation negotiation