Prior to the interview, I was told that the role was looking for a minimum of 2 years of customer-facing experience, with no development experience being necessary. I have over 4 years of customer-facing experience in application support, over 18 months of experience in full-stack software development, and I'm currently a support developer, so I was worried that the role might not be technical enough for me, which is a common issue with software support roles, which often require issues with any technical complexity to be handed off to the development team.
I was able to confirm in the interview that the role was technical enough for me, however the only feedback that I was given regarding why I didn't make it to the next stage was that I wasn't focussed enough on feature development, which felt deeply dissonant with the description of the role I'd been given prior to the interview - especially the emphasis on no development experience being needed. Fortunately I didn't take up the interviewer on her invitation to interview in person in favour of a video interview - as due to my concerns regarding the level of technical complexity of the role, I wanted to confirm that the role was of interest before committing to using annual leave - as I would hate to have had any more of my time being wasted.
I was also told prior to the interview that the interview would be an informal chat, which didn't match with the questions given in the interview.
I also asked about a line from the job description - "Provide support on the maintenance and development tasks related to Salesforce CRM,
internal phone system and set up and maintenance of internal IT systems." I was told that the IT was largely handled by an external company and that everyone used Citrix thin clients, but that IT support was still occasionally needed, including to set up phones and to handle onboarding. IT support, onboarding new employees, and configuring phones is *not* normally part of the job description of a Software Support Engineer, or a Software Developer - it sounds like these responsibilities were tacked onto the job description as they don't want to pay for a proper MSP or in-house IT engineer.