I applied online and heard back from Mark Faraci after a week to do a take home assessment. He didn’t reply to my emails after the initial one but I seemed to be getting moved along through the process.
I built and submitted my app over two days and was then contacted by a coordinator to set up a second round with a new recruiter CC’d, no explanation where the original recruiter went or who the new person, Dakota Favors, was.
I was told the second round would be talking through my app and explaining why I made certain choices, with the possibility to add onto it in the second half.
The second round was with two engineers. From the scheduling email it seemed like one was going to be shadowing the other but in the interview they were both active. They seemed to be on different pages from each other with their requirements not really aligning. One would guide me in one direction and then the other seemed to guide towards a different approach which wasted a decent amount of time.
Unlike what I was told would be the main focus of the interview, I never walked through my app or discussed really any of the design or tech decisions behind it. It was mainly focused around adding some changes in. Usually companies do these take homes to avoid high pressure coding that data structure and algorithm questions create. That seemed to not be the case here, they wanted me to come up with ideal additions to my code on the spot. Don't get me wrong, I think my solutions were pretty hacked together, and I told them ideally I would spend more time thinking about how to best add this in but given we are spending 10 minutes on it, I was using this very rough approach. Whenever I would start to go a direction it seemed each interviewer had a differing opinion from the other about which direction I was supposed to go which created a lot of backtracking.
I definitely could have done better and haven’t prepped much since my peak prep for Google/Meta onsights a couple months back, but in comparison this felt like a clown show and equally as stringent for a relatively tiny company.
What’s the point of a take home if you’re going to have similar rounds as big tech? Like do a DS & Algo 1 hour round to start and then a take home OR onsight to save both parties time. It’s silly to add a take home project at the start on top of a similar series of big tech rounds after. This current setup is not very thought through and they’re not a big enough player to be asking so much time.
I was given a generic rejection email with no feedback for “compliance” reasons which is a bs lazy reply to give in 2025. Impossible to know if it was my performance, they went with another candidate that was further along, or all the other possible reasons. You'd hope a smaller company would give feedback instead of doing the BS big tech does.
All of this said, the two engineers that interviewed me were very nice and had cool personalities, the company process and coordination is just a joke though.
