Contacted Via recruiter, sent resume Initial interview was about 30 to 45 mins on camera; Interview with a senior dev and an architect, mostly done by the senior dev; casual (interviewers were in T-shirts). Asked generic questions about SOLID design principles and dependency injection (DI). Asked detailed questions about Unit testing and my experience with Unit testing and also got into detail about entity framework (EF) and optimizing queries with EF. Questions and expected answers appeared scripted due to their language and non-verbal queues as well as lack of clarification of unclear questions. After the interview, I was emailed a coding "Challenge", which was actually a homework assignment. The assignment instructed me to connect to a government agency API, download and persist public financial information, and then provide an API end point that returned some of that information after doing some calculations on the persisted data. The assignment seemed very similar to the product and type of work that applicants were interviewing for which can make applicants concerned about providing free work. The instructions seemed a bit unprofessional and had ambiguous descriptions of requirements. The feedback I received for the homework assignment was "they were looking for more of a foundation for an enterprise application"

A recruiter phone screen, tech interview with a lead and manager, a take home assignment, and a follow up on the assignment to discuss it. The HR recruitment team is downright rude at worst and bored/unhappy at best. They have extremely rigid compensation ranges with zero room for negotiation. I countered their offer with a < 10% ask above what they offered, just to get me up to near what I'm making now, and they flat out denied me. They said I was told the ranges up front and expectations were set. They didn't try to negotiate at all and for only a few thousand dollars lost me. They are used to paying India wages as all of their current employees are low paid contractors. As they are expanding their engineers to hire in the US I know I won't be able to work with any other talented engineers since their recruiters are so bad and their pay ranges are so low. To make things worse, they claim to be "required by law" to do a pre-offer background check, which checks employment records and references. They will not give an offer without using your references! New York has a law that disallows them from performing criminal background checks but nothing which states that they MUST perform an employment background check before giving an offer. This is a horrible practice and not a legal requirement. They should be sued for misrepresenting the law. If they want to do pre-offer checks that is their right, but don't lie and claim it is the law requiring them to do so. So now I've used my references on this company, received a low offer, and got nothing out of it. When I pushed back on the background check they said they checked with their legal department and were forced to do so, which is a lie. But I went ahead with it anyways and they said they had no other candidates in the pipeline and were "very serious" about me and wanted to move forward. I didn't realize there would be zero room for negotiation. I replied with a very cordial email stating that we should take a break from negotiating for a couple of days and they could let me know if they were still interested, but received no reply. I only feel back for the engineers working there which are trying to build a US based team. Good luck!