Was referred by a friend. Contacted recruiter. Initial phone screen. Fast response.
Interviewer said a completely incorrect name ("Jose" instead of "Jesus") twice, didn't know or care what company I worked at, and seemed extremely disinterested from the start. The recruiter clearly didn't have the right resume and was nonresponsive when I tried to confirm which one she had.
If you're of color or have a feminine voice, beware -- your interviewer may ignore you when you talk, mispronounce your name and inherently treat you differently -- in that precise way where you just feel like you're at an inherent disadvantage. Every one I know who has been hired has been white and mostly male. This is actually the second time I've interviewed in the past six months and honestly felt an extremely hostile tone from an interviewer or recruiter. I thought at first it meant that I was a bad engineer, but I've been working for months at a fantastic startup, growing our front-end and it took me that long to feel confident again in my skill-set.
The fact that they use an awful phone screen with archaic methods in plain JS showed me a lot: this is a company that cares about "hiring smart people capable of picking anything up" but what their real concern is: continuing the terrible interviewing process that plagues our industry, providing interviewing engineers with validity that they are superior, and perpetuating a lack of racial and ethnic diversity along with perpetuation of a hostile engineering environment.
There were no discussions or problems that were relevant to what a front-end engineer does. No build tool discussion, no discussion of a framework you know, no discussion of flexbox, CSS3 grids, web components, the browser rendering process, speed considerations, mobile devices -- anything that's actually relevant to what a front-end engineer does and should be doing. Perhaps they want to test the basics, but these are the basics of our time -- not creating two queues to dynamically add a list of sliders to the page with just plain JS so that 3 are animating at any given time.
Maybe this makes sense for Uber and maybe you will find that I'm wrong -- I hope you do, honestly -- but this interview really showed me I absolutely do not want to work here and you probably shouldn't either. There are other startups that are progressive, other startups who might just remember your name, and perhaps ask you things that are actually relevant instead of JS gymnastics.