The interview process began with an initial phone call with a recruiter, followed by a technical interview, a take-home test, another technical interview, an interview with a project manager, and finally an interview with the director of engineering.

I always had a pleasant interaction with their recruiter, and the calls with her were the saving grace of the process. The first technical interview with one of their engineers was also pleasant, mostly a casual conversation between two developers discussing how to approach different tasks.

The take-home test was not difficult, but it did take a ridiculous amount of time to complete. There wasn't enough direction provided to know where corners could be cut.

The second technical interview was a problem. We walked through the take-home exercise, but there wasn't any clear direction from the interviewers. They seemed to focus a lot on testing practices more than anything, as if I were interviewing for a QA role.

This interview was immediately followed by the interview with a project manager who didn't seem very keen on doing the interview and could have been friendlier. This was meant to be the last stage of the process.

Time had passed, and eventually, I was told that another candidate had to postpone their interview, and therefore it would take a bit longer for a decision to be made. Some more time went by, and then I was told that the director of engineering also wanted to have an interview because apparently, there were some questions left unanswered in one of the earlier interviews.

The interview was postponed less than 10 minutes from the scheduled time. The interview itself was average, and then it still took a few days to get a decision. The whole process took a full 2 months.

Throughout the process, I checked reviews of the company by employees and asked questions to probe the red flags. Generally speaking, they seem to have a micromanagement style, zero trust in staff, and are overly demanding. If you want to change product teams just for the sake of having some variety, you even have to wait for an opening and go through an internal interview process as if you were not even an employee of the company already – I've never heard of such a thing.

The usual questions around career path.

Questions about ways of working.

How to approach different situations.

The take-home test consisted in creating a form to provide a rating and comment, and then displaying submitted results as a chart, as well as the most recent comments.