I was connected via a friend of mine and had an interview with someone in recruiting scheduled shortly after. She connected me with a lovely person on the dev team who I was able to interview before getting my interview.
I spoke with the recruiter a few more times with some concerns I had, to which she was very responsive. The concerns, however, weren't really satisfied in the end. I learned in my discussion with the dev manager that the entire team was less than a year old. Meaning every member of the team before a year ago...left? Was fired? It wasn't really clear at the time and I found that pretty unsettling and very unusual, considering the company is quite a bit older than less than 1 year.
I also asked about all of the negative Glassdoor reviews from the customer success team. There was mention of the dev team being treated well, but the cs team being treated quite the opposite. I wasn't really trying to get a job where some people are treated great and others are treated like hot garbage, so I asked about the negative reviews and how this was being resolved.
The answers provided to both of my concerns weren't quite satisfactory and were a bit...I suppose vague is the word. It all sounded really pleasant, but kind of translated to not-a-lot. I was told the large turnover was due to struggles with change - that one seemed a bit difficult for her to answer. Regarding the upset employees, I was told they were restructuring and have made positive changes that involved flexibility for the team and an increased salary. I don't know why, but things still felt a bit off to me. I considered asking to speak with someone from the CS team, but I didn't think it would make a difference, as it's unlikely any company would pull a dissatisfied employee to represent them to a new interviewee. I was inspired to write this after checking Glassdoor today and seeing that the CS team is still facing similar issues (I interviewed in 2021 for context) - yes, a raise was provided, but the treatment has not improved, morale is still in the gutter, and there was mention the raise was used as leverage against making further changes to both culture or options for pay increase. Also making people work so much overtime without compensating them for that time at such a low salary feels a bit intense and hard on the soul. It was pretty upsetting to read.
All of that said, I'm a fairly new dev, so I decided to proceed with the next step as a way to get more technical interview experience. After I spent quite a lot of time interviewing them, I was offered an actual interview with members of the dev team.
Present was the aforementioned lovely person, along with another person who I found a bit more challenging to interact with. Prior to the interview, I reached out to see what the focus of the interview would be and if there was anything I could do to prepare/ brush up on. I was told that it would just be a working discussion and not to worry about things like languages - that it would be high level.
Well, yeah, that wasn't accurate. The interview focused on back end, something I worked with, but was not at all proficient in (I mentioned this several times before this stage, so I'm actually not sure why they chose to interview me). I would have rather been told "we don't want you to be prepared and I can't help you" when I asked, rather than be caught off-guard when what I was told wasn't accurate. But maybe that's asking a lot, I'm again not seasoned. Anyway, I was asked how I would create an app using some prompts. Thinking this was just a high level working conversation, I explained what I might do, but definitely froze up when they wanted me to write out code. The less-easy-going dev was visibly losing patience and it was quite clear he fully disliked me and my failed efforts. I think if I knew the interview would be so heavily focused on back end and that they'd like me to live-code as a back end developer, I might have reconsidered. But dang, that was god awful, haha. I appreciated bombing the interview, I'm told it's a thing and I should become accustom. I also didn't really want the gig due to the above concerns, but it was still incredibly frustrating that I was mislead (intentionally or otherwise). I guess in the end I mislead them as well, so perhaps this was deserved.
Overall, most everyone I spoke with was really pleasant and took my difficult questions in stride, which surprised me. Tough interview aside, their goals as a company are quite nice, and I hope something meaningful can be done to make the employees feel recognized and appreciated.
Afterwards, as expected, I was emailed a hard pass by the recruiter and was offered training to develop early career engineers. I have since not heard back and I think it's for the best.
