Three calls, all with technical people. No clear description of what the company does, who their customer base is and no mentions of vision, culture and processes. All 3 parts of the interview were technical. First call involved me showing them a piece of code I had worked on. That's not a nice thing to ask from people that have signed NDAs with their employers/clients. Not all of us have open source projects. Second interview contained the typical algorithmic puzzles. These should have been left behind years ago. Final step was a take home assignment. Interviewers expectations were not explicitly stated in the assignment description. He focused a lot on unimportant details and presented his team's conventions as general truths that should be followed by everyone. Terrible interviewing experience with engineers fixating on unnecessary and unimportant details on all three calls.

I had three calls, all of them with engineers. It was not clear to me which one of those was the lead if a lead even exists. During the first call the interviewer failed to properly describe what the company does or how the team is structured. The call felt rushed and technical, not what you would expect from a first call. They asked me to show them a piece of code I had recently worked on. That was the first red flag. Unless you have open source projects of adequate size, you have nothing to show as an employee or freelancer since 99% of the projects you work on make you sign an NDA. Nevertheless I found something to show them and they focused on very small, insignificant details. They were also very opinionated on approaches to coding that are subjective. Anyway, I cautiously agreed to move to the next step that was a 30 minute coding interview which was the typical leetcode-type of interview questions of average difficulty. Second red flag. You are not Google, you cannot ask experienced engineers with years of experience to solve puzzles. The next step was a take-home assignment of, again, average difficulty for the level of seniority. The problem is that there were hidden expectations that only became apparent on the next interview call where, again, the interviewer seemed fixated on implementation details and the "correct" way of doing things. "Correct" as in, the way they do it at Platomics. As if we are supposed to know what conventions they use. The assignment mentioned explicitly that it should not take you more than 3 hours to complete. Yet the interviewer expected me to have written unit tests (first hidden objective) and to have used a specific library that was not mentioned on the assignment description (second hidden objective). They did not like my perfectly working, custom implementation of the same thing, which by the way tells more about my skill than just using a 3rd party library. They also argued about the project's folder structure and modularization and again presented their opinions as generally accepted facts. Do I need to even mention that the assignment description was not asking you to move files and folders around to have the "perfect" folder/module structure? (third hidden objective). At that point I had already regretted not trusting my instincts and moving forward with the interview process. The team at Platomics throughout the interview process seemed fixated on uninteresting small details and presenting their chosen conventions, tools and systems as industry standards. They convey a lack of business awareness and seem to be looking for an agreeable unopinionated junior with the skills of a senior. If that is how the interview looks, imagine how working with them would be.