I got invited for a face to face interview for a position of contract Python Developer. I interviewed with 3 interviewers, one at a time, in sequence. The first 2 interviewers (other developers at the company) seemed a bit biased - I could tell that no matter how well I would answer their questions I would probably not get positive feedback. That said, I did answer the technical questions correctly and we had a bit more of a chat on the more open-ended questions. After that I met the manager with whom I had a chat without too many technical questions - rather a high-level conversation about some particular technologies (e.g. Apache Kafka) and my experience with them. I was told that my approach to implementing Kafka at another company was wrong ("Kafka is not meant to replace RPC" was the quote used -- what if all communication between services is done through RPC in some system - does it mean that Kafka should never be used in that given system?). When I asked to clarify his position or wanted to defend my architectural choice with logical arguments I was cut short and told that the manager would not discuss that further - so that stopped any meaningful bilateral discussion, which was a bit disappointing. Despite that I was asked to implement a technical challenge, which I have done and done so correctly. However in line with my initial perceptions I did not progress further even though they had to admit the task was done correctly and they did not specify any particular flaws with it - just got a vague "the solution was a little bit bloated" even though I made sure it was nicely separated into modules, extensible and readable - ensuring some of these things may increase number of lines of code but it's completely worth it (it's not code golf after all). In general I was not terribly impressed with their technical competencies and approach to interviewing.