Over my career I've done a lot of interviews, but none were so awkward as this one. It started easily with just a HackerRank test (they used tests that were available on that site already). After that I received an email saying they wanted to talk with me.
The interview was done by one of their engineers, and he was by far the most awkward person you could've had during an interview.
First of all it was on Google Hangouts, and although I am used to high-bandwidth communication like video, he only resorted to audio. Which in my mind is very unwelcoming. His English wasn't specifically great either (I think he was Greek) so I couldn't fully understand most of the things he was trying to say.
Then he started to ask me three questions (listed below) and said there was time for asking him questions after. Overall during his "question phase" he seemed very unprepared / unexperienced to the process.
After answering his questions there was indeed time for me to ask him questions, so I went on to ask my series of questions that I always ask companies during interviews (I'm a serial interviewer, I admit):
Question: How do you determine your roadmap?
Answer: They were still working that out and didn't have a specific method that they used. It sounded all very ad-hoc.
Question: Do you have a system in place for code quality, such as code reviews?
Answer: Yes they did code reviews, although it didn't became clear how strict this was, and if it was actually enforced in their development.
Question: How do you handle technical debt, do you refactor after release, or write code as clean as possible on the try of a prototype?
Answer: Very non-specific, he liked clean code but that was about it.
Question: Could you tell me how a day would look like for me if I would work at your company?
Answer: "Depends on which project you work." (this is his literal answer, nothing was explained further and I left it with that).
I had more questions, but he became somewhat irritated and wanted to stop even though they scheduled a max of 60 minutes for the call (we are 27 minutes in at this point).
Conclusion:
Overall this seemed like an engineer who was thrown into the interview process without having zero knowledge about what he was supposed to do, or measure the quality of coders (after checking out his blog this only confirmed my suspicion) . Too bad as the company looked like to have a cool product, but their hiring is very sub-par.
