I solved their challenge and was invited to a talk with the CEO to collect the prize money. The CEO was nice although extremely sure of himself and his product (which was later pivoted to a VPN). He offered me an interview with the CTO, despite I had no intention of quitting my current job. The interview took place in the CTO's cubical, where he asked me a single question. The man was arrogant; considers his field (optimization) as the only one existing in the computer science world.

Afterwards, I understand that prior communication with HR(s) was alarming enough to not have any further businesses with this self-admiring gang. "Here's our coding standarts, you should read it carefully, those are definitely important!" If it's that imporatnt, why don't you just provide me a sort of eslint config? "Here's our DNA which is even more important!" Half hundred A4 pages of corporate blah-blah-blah... where you can read how cool they are because of developing just some shady VPN services. As for me, that's over too rude trying to trash candidate's head with a bunch of coprorate values at the very first stage of interview process. But ok, let's say I've flipped through those readings briefly. What's next? Officially the process described as "you'll have at first to solve 2 tasks online and then take 3 interviews of 10, 30 and 60 minutes durability respectively". On practice it appeared to be the dummiest process I've ever seen during my over ten years career. 1) Two tasks. Just regular codilityorwhatever-based mid-level brain-teasers. Nothing special. 2) "Interview (10 min.)" It's getting more interesting from this point. HR, who according to her own words can't grasp any single line of code but is just watching after the timer, gave some task for live coding session. Why not to add just another task to the first stage? I guess if I have asked that question I'd hear something like: "You may have asked someone else to solve it for you." Yes, I could have done so. But also I could have invited a prompter to join me during the second stage of an interview. 3) "Interview (30 min.)" Surprise-surprise. Looks like they've considered that my abovementioned assumption long before I've even thought of it. This stage is formally, the same as stage #2, but with couple of tasks instead of only one, time limit increased respectively, and instead of providing text description, task was "slurpedly" pronounced by an opponent who I'm not even sure whether somehow related to the company, since he didn't introduce himself much. So, no introduction. Horrible illegible pronunciation with some exotic accent. And like cherry on the pie, accompaniment of clanging plates and glasses and loudly "agu-agu'ing" baby somwhere on a background! Kinda sort of things that you won't always hear when ordering meal by phone from fastfood during they're having baby birthday celebrating in place, because fastfoods have more respect to their clients than Hola to their potential employees. Here's where I've reasonably quit. However there's nothing that makes me believe that subsequent step wouldn't have been just another live coding 60m session with already four+ excercises read from paper by someone who didn't spoke a word in english before in his life at all. It's clearly obvious that they don't trust codility, they don't trust their own HR as an arbitr; every subsequent stage of a process "overrides" the previous one. Then why to spread that anal carnival process into all those dublicated stages? Why the hell to call each of those stages an "interview"? Just because... Disgusting. Impolite. Unprofessional. Adiós, Hola!