Total Scam
I applied online, followed by a call with the CEO (I was intrigued why the CEO would want to have the first direct call), during the call the CEO told me that their annual revenue is close to $300Million and that he is looking for someone who will directly report to him. The job description was vague and the CEO had no idea about any of the languages his products are coded in.
The Second step was meeting the CEO in person, which happened at a co-working space in DTLA. during this the CEO told me that he is moving his "team" to LA shortly, and that he is leasing SnapChat's old office. The meeting lasted 15 minutes, during which he told me about what the companies products do, and told me to research and tell him how to make them better (as part of the interview).
Third step was another call after a few days, I had already worked on understanding their API and thought about their future products, so had a few ideas on how to extend functionalities of their products. The CEO sounded super impressed and told me to send him an email detailing my target compensation.
I sent an email with the compensation ($35/hr) which is normal for a software engineer, and also wrote that it was negotiable. I never got any response after that from him or his secretary, who i followed up with.
Now, I never met anyone else from the company, the secretary was on the calls with us, but would never even say "hi" or acknowledge me greeting her. All this was a little suspicious so i decided to do some digging. Turns out the CEO is on the run for money after defrauding his investors (raising more money on bogus company profits/partnerships), which explains the leasing snapchats old office to the $300M annual turnover but working out of a co-working office.
