Scored highly on the Codility test and quickly moved onto 2 separate, hour-long interviews with a senior and junior engineer. One of them was the worst interview experience of my career – and that was a tall order. So they did Strive in that respect. After 4.5 hours, it all came down to a 15 minute interaction.
I was asked to design a RESTful API service in pseudocode, as close-to-production-ready as possible. Also, it was OK to do things you would never do in production, such as asking a database to return every record, and then do the filtering on the database client side, at the interviewer's suggestion. Some aspects could be hand-waved away. The contradictions were all up to the whims of the interviewer, and the goalposts always moving.
I've been designing such APIs for roughly 15 years, so I discussed the real-life toolset on which I would base my solution, from boilerplate to DI, from routing to strongly typed request models with auto validation. Very few people reinvent validation these days. After some time I noticed background noises coming from the interviewer's side. Borderline distracting but I assumed he would address it without being prompted, and decided to strive ahead. He then asked "what about validation". I had discussed it earlier, but now it was clear he wanted me to do it manually. So I went down this path. After more time, the aforementioned noises reached an unprofessional and unworkable level. Bangs, clanks, and a loud one-sided conversation from an unseen person. I had to stop everything and prompt him to address it. He apologized and went on mute. It seriously threw me off, and with the 3 hours of interview stress-induced sleep I was working with, it was very difficult to recover. Much more than the interviewer appreciated. The remainder of the hour was spent surveying my relevant tech/background. I checked 9 of 10 boxes by my count.
A few days later, the rejection arrived with the most flimsy, low-effort, and bad-faith argument: "failed to validate input data without prompting, but liked as a team fit".
So what was being imagined by this interviewer? That for all my career I had never thought to validate input data? I had just been getting away with it for the last 10+ years, with enterprises small, medium, and household-name large, and only his wisdom revealed the whole truth about my scam of a career? And no mention of your noise failure?
"BuT We haVEe oTHer CaNDidAteS to INTerView"
Fair enough, but it seems that they are relying on the random chance that a highly-qualified person makes the slightest, easily-reconcilable misstep to do the hard filtering work for them. In other words, it looks like they are just winging it. To be fair, it's nothing against this company specifically. It's just another example of the same low standard of technical interviewing, where decisions are made on bad evidence, that most of the industry has set for itself. They call it "being picky".
"but liked as a team fit"
With all the talk about team/culture-fit by the recruiter and job description, you would think they would jump on a good team fit.
So that was my awful experience with a company that really talks itself up. To be fair, my other interviewer was amazing.
He was:
- properly matched to my years of experience level, whereas the other interviewer was about one fourth of mine. Properly matched YOE lend more nuance to the interview.
- genuinely wanting me to succeed, and interested in my experience.
- almost apologetic about having me do a live coding exercise, even seemed skeptical of the whole farce. This was refreshing, and helped lower the anxiety a few notches.
- receptive to chit-chat and talking shop. I could tell he found this much more valuable and revealing than live coding.
Seriously, this guy was an example, and I wish there was more room to spend time on him.
The net result is that I didn't feel this was a serious inquiry into what I had to offer, he was too quick to pile-up on one flub, and the noise incident is still unbelievable. It was all torpedoed by reasons having little to do with my skills.
Ultimately it's up to you if you want to pursue this company. It's mostly luck. If you think you can flip a coin on heads 10 times in a row, then go for it. Otherwise, you may want to rethink where to invest your time. In my case: 4.5 hours, with potentially hours more in later rounds, plus countless hours of prep time. Use your own judgment.
It wouldn't be fair to judge an entire company on this 15-minute read, would it?
