I was contacted by a recruiter on my work webmail. The name "Threads" piqued my interest and stood out to me so I looked into the product and found it quite ingenious actually. It's basically making communication a series of Pull Requests. Due to that, though I typically ignore recruiters, I responded and experienced my eagerness to consider working with Threads. Following that, the recruiter apprised me of the process which simply was: - Initial call with the recruiter to discuss the role, compensation and the company at large. - Follow-up call with the CEO, who by the way has a very fun, infectious personality and he's rather excited about the product. - Further calls with team members from product and engineering. - Two-day working interview. Now on my perception of the whole experience. I would examine this in terms of flags; green for good things I noticed, red for bad things. Green Flags - Transparency: Everyone from the was pretty open about anything and everything they did. From the details on the process to features coming out to compensation. - Excitement: This is a bit of a weird one but it's a good thing to see people in a company who are genuinely excited about the product. Red Flags - Correspondence: I am a big proponent of maintaining a good work/life balance regardless of if you're still at the startup stage or at the seasoned, industry leader stage. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth when I get emails from the company that require my confirmation on the weekend i.e. both on saturday and sunday. Unless if it's something very revenue-sensitive, I feel work-related communication should wait till Monday. - Communication: I feel like there might have been some misunderstanding because I thought when they reached out to me, they had run out of candidates and were looking to see if we could work together. In truth though, they were in discussions with other candidates which would have been fine except that one was already at the offer stage. This is something that should have been communicated earlier especially since they are proponents of transparency because it feels like I sort of wasted my time. To be honest, when I found that out just before the 2-day working interview, I wanted to decline and stop the process right away as I already didn't feel good about giving up vacation days at my current company on a "maybe" promise of an offer and that additional revelation wasn't helping matters. It gave me additional pause in terms of the fact that they do not value the time of candidates/employees as much as they should. I didn't decline it though as I wanted to see what path they'd take in dealing with a candidate at the offer stage yet interviewing other candidates. - Tone: This may be my own take but the way the product interviewer kept responding to my explanations on product processes kept putting me off. They kept saying "that makes sense" with a tone that felt like they were just going through the motions. I expected a bit more deliberation and conversation especially since we were talking about product. - Two-day working interview: This is a bit of a subjective opinion but I feel asking candidates to at least build a proof-of-concept app on their own time might be a better, more inclusive gauge of a candidates skill. This is because not every candidate can take 2 days off on short notice to work for another company even if it is paid. Maintaining this as a strict interviewing process could pose a significant barrier to entry. These red flags I mentioned above didn't give me solid confidence about working with them long term. So I was already expecting their email about going with other options and was not surprised when it came. I don't think that's a really good sign. It felt a touch like they were leading candidates on just to cross their own "i's and t's" on their assurance of the candidate they were about to give an offer to without considering the time of the other candidates. All in all, I feel as a company and product, Threads has potential to grow and evolve. However, right now they are still in the storming stage/maybe on the cusp of the norming stage and are still figuring out some of the processes necessary to give the product and company a proper lift-off beyond just shipping features. It will be interesting to see what they look like if and when they get to the performing stage.