Bulb Senior Software Engineer interview questions

Phone screen then Geektastic task. Note the task is peer reviewed against criteria that contradict what's written in its text and ran against test cases that are hidden from you. Obviously Bulb is allowed to recruit however it sees fit. However, this is probably indicative of what working at Bulb would be like. I imagine clear communication is not something that can be expected while working at Bulb. It seems like it would be a corporate nightmare masked as a social enterprise. The worst kind of corporate nightmare. The noticeably divided reviews on Glassdoor seem to support this conclusion. Seems there's a camp of people who haven't realized they're addicted to the corporate Kool-Aid and a camp that have found they're allergic to it.

There was first a phone call and a take-home coding exercise. The coding exercise was fairly simple, but one key point of this was that you needed to know how electricity and gas billing periods are calculated. There was a vague one-liner in the guidelines that suggested how this is done but even that was inaccurate. I passed the test, but for the next round, I was asked to refactor someone's horrible code. Fair enough, that is something you'd encounter quite frequently in the software world. But even for this round, I struggled with trying to understand what exactly a billing period was. Not the logic, not the programming concepts, not the design. A simple explanation of the billing period. Once it was explained clearly, I wrote the code, and completed the test. Obviously that cost me a few extra minutes. The interviewer said that was enough, so I stopped there. I got a feedback mentioning I struggled to understand the requirements, and that I didn't add tests. I would have, if the interviewer had asked me to, because I wrote a whole lot of tests for the original test. I don't understand how they expect a programmer to know the ins and outs of energy bills calculations.