My first interview was an hour-long Slack chat with another developer. It was a pretty standard interview with some HR-style questions and some technical ones. My interviewer was extremely nice and polite throughout the interview.

In the next step, they sent me a small project written in Obj-C and asked me to find and fix the problems with it. This was also easy.

The last step was the trial process. They assigned me a trial buddy and gave me a task that required adding a feature to the WordPress iOS app. The task was also easy, and I completed it in about 10 days and opened my first PR. This is when things started to go awry.

My first PR was large and therefore got rejected by my trial buddy. They have a rule that forces you to keep your PRs less than 500 lines, which I didn't know until after I pushed. So I split the work into several smaller parts and opened a much smaller PR containing the first part. This was also rejected because of the same reason. When I talked to my trial buddy about it, he said, "It's okay, you can leave it as it is." Then he reviewed my code, and I addressed everything he mentioned in the reviews. The next day, they ended my trial with some ridiculous feedback. The two most important points were:

• I "was resistant to feedback." I wasn't; I did everything they asked me to, except splitting my last PR because my trial buddy said that it's okay to leave it as it is. Clearly, it wasn't. Why the lying?
• I "didn't split my work into subtasks." I did, and it was visible publicly. The first rejection messed up my list of subtasks, and I needed to talk to my buddy before creating a new one (because I didn't know what he would accept). He had said that "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." It seems like we had already come to it. Again, why the lying?

In short, a trial process that should have gone well ended because of the hypocritical behavior of my so-called trial buddy, who was also relatively new to the company and clearly didn't want to dedicate much time to the trial process. Once they assign a buddy, there's no control mechanism that checks his actions. The decision is his alone.

Do not waste your time applying here if you're looking for a place where you can collaborate with other people and make decisions accordingly. They only expect you to "obey their commands" without questioning. Even a single question, and you're "resistant to feedback."

Standard HR style questions.