The entire interview process was over Slack. It was a low-key interview with a few technical questions and some more probing questions that seemed to focus on culture fit. Overall, I felt the technical questions were pretty solid, but not too tough to answer.

After the technical/culture interview, I was invited to work on their take-home. This is where it started to go awry. As many others have mentioned, the technical coding take-home is a broken WordPress plugin that someone with solid WordPress/PHP experience should be able to fix.

However, here are the key technical points in the job listing right here on Glassdoor:

• A rock-solid understanding of the core JavaScript language, HTML5, and CSS3. Experience working on accessibility is a plus.
• Familiarity with a server-side language like PHP, Ruby, or Python.
• Proficiency developing well-structured web applications using modern JavaScript tools like React and Redux.

The take-home covers none of these points and is all PHP-based. If you are familiar with Ruby or Python, this won't help you at all when it's time to slog through PHP.

I feel my resume is pretty solid for the points mentioned. However, NOWHERE on my resume do I list PHP or WP plugin development as a skill. While I did get the plugin working, the follow-up questions were all related to PHP, server load balancing (???), and plugin design.

So, for a JS Engineer position, there was 1 question about vanilla JS. Zero for HTML, CSS, or React/Redux/front-end framework of choice. That seems odd given the job description!

From the job description, I'd guess they're looking for some sharp JS folks who know a JS framework. The interview is really, really geared to not getting that.

Explain async JavaScript to me as if I were a co-worker.

How many simultaneous connections could a typical server handle before suffering a performance hit?

Discuss a CSRF attack.