The recruiter reached me at the beginning of November 2020. As they told me, they are setting up brand new software development teams in their Amsterdam office. After I told them I want to continue the process, I got my first interview invitation after three weeks. The first interview was with an engineering manager who oversees these new teams. He was a good guy whom I enjoyed interviewing. He asked me about my background and past experiences. I also explained to him how I want to continue my career. He stated that they are looking for people with some financial knowledge, which I have. He told me that the next step would be a technical interview but with a surprise. This technical interview will be a pair programming session, which has to be remote. I wanted to learn the reason since it is an interesting way of interviewing during this period. He told me that they hired contractors to start the foundation. But later, they decided these contractors should decide on the interview procedure and do interviews. These contractors decided that everything should be done by pair programming, even interviews. In my opinion, this can't be determined by contractors because they are going to leave the company. Three weeks later, I got the invitation for the technical interview. The recruiter told me that it would be a 2-hour session, and I should prepare the environment that I will be comfortable. There were two contractors as interviewers in the session. We started coding a URL shortener backend application. They were very rude from the start and criticized everything until the end. Their comments were not to improve pair programming but to block and demoralize me. After this technical interview, the recruiter reached to tell me that they want to continue the next step of the interview. I told him that I don't want to continue because of the technical interview, and I don't want to work with people like them.

After having applied to takeaway.com for a role in Berlin I received an email from hr recruiter for a phone call which I had to schedule with the help of a third party application they provided over email. Immediately after scheduling the call I get a message from the recruiter that it was really nice talking to you.....an automated email which we receive after the initial screening round kind of an automated mail and that we would we cannot move ahead with your application. Etc So was this a joke? Do you take applications seriously?