Recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. I spoke to her and she asked me to complete a take-home project which involved integrating the Adyen payment gateway into a personal project. They wanted this done and submitted in a week plus deployed to a public cloud. My experience was extremely poor as I had multiple other interviews scheduled (with Google, Amazon, MongoDB and GoDaddy), yet the recruiter kept emailing me every morning and asking for an update on whether or not the project was done or not. I ended up submitting it half-done but was disheartened to see that their engineers did not even read through the code at the bare minimum. The feedback received was clearly indicative of the fact that their engineers did not bother to read the code at all. The assignment said that we can refer their GitHub projects. Feedback received complained about similarities between their posted projects and what was submitted. The documentation was also so poorly written with lots of mistakes, that the integration itself was not easy to do (there were mistakes like the API keys mentioned to be used, did not actually work). It was the interview experience I had that year! Every other company was graceful and respectful of my time except this one.

The interview experience felt quite awkward and not very welcoming. The interviewer didn’t come across as particularly friendly, which made it hard to have a natural conversation. It also felt like there was an expectation to overly “sell” or hype the company, rather than having a balanced and genuine discussion about the role and fit. Overall, the interaction didn’t feel like a normal two-way conversation. After the interview, I received a rejection without any feedback, which was disappointing and made it difficult to understand where I could improve.