Initial step was a take-home. Spent ~15 hours on it, in which I made sure I wrote well designed code, and tested thoroughly. Great take-home challenge. I was feeling great, the take-home was pretty exciting and challenging. It allowed you to be creative and give just the right amount of information to be creative about your implementation.
Next step was a Hiring Managers screen. The recruiter said it was an opportunity to learn about the role, and learn about my background. The interviewer was 10 min late to the call (on a 30 min call), which was already a not so great start. The interviewer did not asked to reschedule, even though they knew the interview was going to be cut short (adding to the list of issues). The interview follow the normal process, sharing information about myself, and my past experiences, but it felt the interviewer was not interested at all in the call, because they did not engage at all in any of the responses, felt like they were reading a script were they are not allowed to engage. Then they got the opportunity to share about the role, but did it in a way that was pretty unexciting (which my thought is, hey this is the opportunity to sell me the company and the position, another issue). At the end of the interview (which was cut 2-3 min short because they needed to leave the room, hopefully the last issue?), they asked 1 "open ended question" without giving any expectations, and 1 technical concept. The questions asked seemed off based on the amount of time we had left (less than 5 min). The open ended question was I think to test my thinking process, but the question was asked out of nowhere, without any guidance, without providing any information of what they were looking for. Why ask a question where you expect the candidate to give a thorough answer in less then 5 minutes and when you give no context at all?
The cherry on top was that at no point they asked about the project I spent 15 hours working on. To me this is just disrespectful and a waste of time. Either they are just using it to weed out candidates that don't really care about the company, or they don't care about the project. If I knew this, I wouldn't have spent that many hours working on it.
I feel like if you want to test any of my thought process in 5 minutes (which is what the "technical" portion lasted), what a better way to use the project that I literally spent multiple hours working on it? I prepared a lot before the call to make sure I wrote down every decision I took on the project, understood the high picture, and even think about how the project could benefit the company.
Overall, if felt like a waste of my time with a company that does not appreciate the time I spent on the take-home challenge, and with an interviewer that does not really care about interviewing people.
