I applied for the SRE role and was contacted by there recruiter for a preliminary chat. The recruiter then arranged an hour phone screen with their Head of IT and Operations. This interview was conducted via Skype. The interview covered projects on my resume, technical questions, security topic and my SRE experience. The interview went well and I was again contacted by the recruiter telling me "good new" that Centralway would like to move forward and bring me on site to Zurich for a day . As I live in the United States I was asked to provide some potential dates for travel to Switzerland which I promptly did. What happened next is truly bizarre. The recruiter emails me back and says Centralway will pay for my airfare but would not be paying for my hotel or any accommodation expenses. As someone with 15 years of experience in the tech industry I can say that this is unheard of. The flight would be 8 hours and with a 6 hour time zone difference. It would be impossible for a candidate to have a good interview with spending a night there. Thinking this was an extremely odd situation that I was being put in and suspecting this recruiter lacked experience or perhaps there was a language barrier(He was Italian,) I asked if there was someone else I might speak to about travel arrangements(usually companies have an expediter that handles logistics.) The response to my question from the recruiter was "Well we will agree to put you up for a night in a hotel if you don't have to fly direct to Zurich and can take a flight with a layover." I responded that of courseI would have no problem with a flight that entailed a layover if it meant they would put me up a hotel. A couple of days later I received an email from the same recruiter stating that my email asking if I could speak to someone else about travel logistics was "very inappropriate" and that the invitation was now being rescinded. I have never experienced anything like it. I am guessing the company has no idea how bad and unprofessional their recruiters are or maybe they do and and just don't care. I read a number of negative reviews before I interviewed with Centralway. People mention things like how they have a policy where employees can't keep stuff on their desks(you can see it in pictures.) My first thought was that this was just disgruntled employees but I now realize that there is something really off and pathological about this company.

I was not looking for a change but was approached via Linkedin by their HR and presented with a DevOps position in Zurich or full-remote with an exciting company involved in: cloud only operations, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, GO / Java with strong emphasis on full-remote position and pairing with IOS (2 FTE) & Android (2 FTE) developers in Agile manner. Advertised as: * full-cloud company (AWS) * Docker/Kubernetes/kops * Ansible * running GO/Java apps * Couchbase/Cassandra/Postgresql/Kafka Sounded interesting regarding technology stack and structured way of working (as presented) so they scheduled me for a discussion a manager. Discussion went well but started to have doubts as kept on presenting the position as SRE with on-call rotation and local in Zurich. After the discussion I received and assignment of tangential things I was expected to work with and presented as a 2-3h task (not even close to reality considering the requirements and full documentation requested). Completed the task and sent to HR (as requested); after one day received an email that I passed and we can move on to present my assignment. Expected to present my task and discuss it but was asked questions about totally different subjects: Linux IO matters, system calls, CISCO networking (strange in a full-cloud company where you don't even access the networking layer in full), sym/asym encryption, Python (when they use GO and Java). No real issue as everyone has the right to design their interviews and recruit process accordingly but the topics I was facing were not even close to my last years of work experience that was clearly stated on my profile. Overall: not a very good experience as HR/Recruiting presented something & received an assignment on the topic but manager was expecting a different skill set than advertised; I wasted time in 3 calls, a lot of e-mail ping-pong and a Saturday for the assignment for something totally different that what I was advertised.