I interviewed with Vika.

She asked if I was willing to work more than 8 hours a day and be on duty during weekends with no extra pay. I'm pretty sure that's illegal in Spain, but whatever. I told her I was willing to do so.

She proceeded to send me the take-home challenge, which consisted of a "5 hour" Node.js project that implemented an API to deposit user balances, among other things. In reality, one will spend 8+ hours on this challenge.

I made sure to read other reviews and focused on concurrency and transactions. I also went the "extra mile" and added some unit tests.

After a few days, my application was rejected with the following pros and cons from the exercise. It seems they did not even check the code, as they lied about the cons of my implementation.

They said:

PROS:

• Prevents paying jobs twice
• Transaction for paying jobs
• Safe concurrent update of jobs and balances
• Uses a SQL aggregation for calculating the sum of unpaid jobs
• Prevents negative/invalid deposits
• Transaction for deposits
• Admin aggregations in Sequelize
• No excessive use of transactions
• At least 1 test

CONS:

• Prevents deposits to another user's account
• Prevents SQL injection
• Project structure by domain (or similar)
• No queries in routes/controllers

These cons were not even true to the exercise implementation. I replied:

• "You cannot effectively deposit into another user's account. The balancesRouter.js implements the logic to prevent doing so."
• "You did not mention input sanitation in the instructions. Sequelize already prevents SQL injection by default when using parameter methods."
• "There are no queries in the routers. They call services and repositories."
• "You did not specify any requirement on the project structure. It uses a classic layered structure with service-repository separation."

They then replied, doubling down on input sanitation and project structure.

Their engineering team discards candidates "at will," even when following all the exercise instructions. They really think "input sanitation" is a reason to discard this exercise with all the pros I highlighted.

"Yes bro, I can implement proper concurrency and DB transactions, but input sanitation is out of my skill level. Ok bro. What a joke."

Do not waste your time with this company.

Are you willing to work on weekends in case of an incident with no extra pay? (Illegal practice)

Are you willing to work more than your 8 hours per day on some days?