My interview experience with Bitnami was bizarre and frustrating. The process took around 5 weeks, and there were still two stages left to go : Project & subsequent interviews about it. Between each video interview, there was about a week long gap, with the interview with the CEO taking the longest time to arrange, almost ten days. The delays are okay, but what was frustrating was that in between the interviews the HR person would simply vanish away and wouldn't even reply to my queries until she had a query of her own. There was no attempt to timely keep me posted with the progress; frequent communication is not an unfair expectation considering that their apply and interview process takes a lot of time on candidate's behalf. What made me abhor this specific company (enough to write this on GlassDoor) was the last interview.
The interview with the CEO took ten days to arrange, then it happened with the CEO promising to get back to me in 2-3 days. After that, no one bothered to get back to me. Now, one month into the hiring process with a tiresome team, I had started to really really dislike the company and there were too many red flags for me, but at the time I really needed a job, so against my better judgement, I wrote to the HR person requesting an update. No reply for another whole week. Finally, I concluded that they are just unprofessional and I am better off without them. But just then the HR person finally got back to me saying that I wasn't selected for the next round and she understood that the hiring has been painful, but a lot of the team was on vacation and hence it took time to make a decision. Well, all she had to do was to write to me at least a week earlier and tell me this exact excuse while asking me to wait for the final decision, all good companies behave this way these days. Apart from this, all the team members I interviewed with seemed unfriendly, just busy doing their job.
The second wrong thing about the interview with the CEO was, well, the CEO himself. It was an early morning interview, he seemed stressed and mentioned something about back to back meetings. He had a whole list of questions to go through, in the end I asked him two questions. One question was something like 'What do you expect my responsibilities would be under this job.' Now I expected him to tell me the projects I would be working on but he didn't even mention that in passing. Instead, he mentioned that 'he expects me to hit the ground running, and if anyone's expecting a 9-5 job then they can do that at IBM etc but not a Bitnami because here you are trying to make a "difference."' What 'difference' exactly is the team making, he didn't explain. Basically, he said that screw 9-5, be ready to spend all your time here. This was such bad CEOship. Any talented, skilled CEO would have tried to motivate me about the work and company because when people are motivated they automatically spend time on doing their best. Only an immature/bad CEO would insist that employees should spend more time at job, that's the way to make people feel stressed. Apparently, long work hours is some kind of a touchy point for the CEO. There's a rediff interview where he sorts of looses it when somebody called out the work hours at Bitnami. Perhaps he needs to read some work by DHH and Jason Fried, 'It doesn't have to be crazy at work.'
Overall, from the interview process, this seemed like an unprofessional team with lots of stress points. They wasted a lot of my time.
Anyway, the least thing they can do is to respect candidate's time and keep the communication open if things are delaying at their end. If they expect new employees to hit the ground running, surely they can reply in a timely manner to potential employees.
