The frontend and backend interviews were great. The interviewers were calm and level-headed and allowed me to showcase my technical strengths. The hiring manager interviews were not as great. Different hiring managers have different ways of interviewing and you're guessing what it is they want to hear. I think GitLab needs to work on standardizing this process and training interviewers how to interview. In the first interview, the example story I gave was clearly not a fit for the interviewing. Perhaps they could have mentioned that and pivoted, or initially mentioned what they were looking for. In the second interview, I was given feedback for not mentioning things that the interviewer did not even ask. You can't have a candidate who was given incredible feedback on the technical stages (as mentioned by the recruiters and the hiring managers) and barely passing HM rounds. There's a clear mismatch here. Interviewing is a hard thing in general in the software engineering field, and it's something every IC & EM need to work on.