The beginning of the process was a standard and charming interview with a recruiter and went well. Pretty standard basis for that convo e.g background, interests and prior projects. Afterward they followed up with a coding challenge that felt a bit heavy handed with lots of "bonus points" that felt quite a bit like "do these or you're not a contender". I had a week to complete the task which was to take a given CSV of urls of photos, extract and store them in a DB of your choice. Then implement a backend to retrieve these photos complete with pagination, user authentication, dimension filtering etc. Then implement a Frontend to render the paginated photos, toggle them as color or grayscale, add a user sign in. I did this and adding docker configurations and a makefile so the team could run the system easily. After this I had a follow up conversation with two engineers on their team which went well. And then radio silence from the recruiter for over a week. Afterward i reached out to them and the recruiter informed me that they decided to go forward with another candidate "who had more experience" (I've been working in industry for 3 years) I mean I get it but don't leave your candidates hanging for over a week only to inform them that they've chosen another engineer, it's quite rude especially when the technical challenge is on the beefier side.

I spoke on the phone with an executive about my previous experience in wireless networking. There was a lot of overlap between things that I had done and things that the company wanted to accomplish, soon. Also, I was a known quantity to a lead technical person with the company. Alas, I never heard back. Due to churn in the company, that CxO was gone shortly after I reached out! Then I read the reviews at Glassdoor and, whoa! Red flags everywhere and, wouldn't you know it, a reputation for churn. Well-run companies do not lose track of promising companies when top people leave or are fired.