The interview included four stages:

• Initial Screening Asked about my professional history, my ambitions, skill set, salary expectations, etc.

• Talk with Manager A more detailed discussion about my technical background, the role's responsibilities, the methodology used, tech stack, and what they were looking for.

• Technical Interview The project was a Next.js app with an App router. I was asked to fix some bugs and implement some functionality, with a soft limit of 50 minutes. Unfortunately, this was the disappointing part of the process. Typically, it's standard to have more than one developer during this step to avoid bias and ensure a more comprehensive analysis of the candidate, which was not the case here.

  There was only one developer interviewing me, and the entire challenge was conducted on a virtual coding platform, which was, according to the developer, new and unfortunately, they wanted to test it on my interview. None of the normal VSCode shortcuts, keybinds, or navigation commands worked, and the node_modules folder wasn't ignored in "Search All," meaning I had to manually navigate between files, which ultimately hurt my performance. Although I had completed all the challenges, I was dismissed for a "lack of performance" in their test coding environment. It's clear that doing the challenge in a real coding software (e.g., VSCode) would have avoided this issue altogether.

• Final Talk with Manager

Asked what I knew about security, testing, and performance optimization practices in React Native projects.

As well as which tech stack and third-party software could be used to monitor or diagnose issues in production.