Dodged a bullet. There were red flags absolutely everywhere. The person I spoke to on the phone knew nothing about the role, the process, or the engineering team at ME+EM, so I went into this process pretty blind. I reached the final round and had the misfortune of interviewing in their office. It appears to be a toxic, fear-driven work environment, as the employee reviews seem to suggest. The atmosphere when I visited the office seemed completely off. Everyone seemed hostile, anxious, and scared, including the mid and senior engineers who were part of the panel that interviewed me. To top it off, the lead engineer came off as insecure and behaved unprofessionally, sniggering and laughing at me whilst answering technical questions. I would STRONGLY recommend giving this company a miss unless you absolutely need a job. There are lots of better companies out there with healthier work environments. If you do decide to go through the process, here it is: The first stage is a phone screen with someone in the talent acquisition team (~5 minute call). I was asked basic questions about myself (e.g. where I work, what I do, my salary expectations). The second stage is a take-home test. It's pretty easy if you have experience building projects from scratch. You're given a link to a project on GitHub that you need to fork, and you need to make the project production-ready. They recommend spending 4 hours, but it’ll probably take you a bit more than that.  The third stage is an in-person interview in their office, where you’ll answer technical questions for 1 hour with a panel of 4 people (1 mid, 1 senior, 1 CTO, and 1 lead engineer). You'll spend around 20 minutes answering project-specific questions, and the remaining 40 minutes will be standard web development technical questions and questions based on your CV. If you want to ask questions, they’ll answer them after you complete the 1 hour interview.

Quickly turned into a nightmare. Senior interviewer came across as needlessly combative and insecure, with the kind of behaviour that borders on workplace bullying. Sneering at answers and injecting snarky quips like “x would have been a better answer” is not rigorous interviewing, it is ego management at someone else’s expense. It is 2025. Publicly critiquing answers while someone is actively giving them is not normal, productive, or professional. At one stage an answer was repeated back to me in a disparaging way which was bizarre and completely caught me off guard. I'm not sure if this is a 'Good cop, bad cop' routine it damaged my perception of the company immediately. Their role is to create clarity, raise the level of the room, and enable others to do their best work. Not to belittle, posture, or create an atmosphere of fear. The basics were missed here. It's especially annoying because the time spent on this company equates to a full working day. However not to be all doom and gloom, a more senior leader involved non-technically on the call knew the assignment well and was astute, and indeed a pleasure to interact with! So there is hope. Probably best to avoid unless you are desperate.