They clearly spent a lot of effort on their interview process, but it felt incredibly impractical. They use CodeSignal for their coding interviews and wanted to make it a more pleasant experience for their interviewees. Their solution was to invest heavily into setting up scaffolding and test cases in advance.

One coding interview was so incredibly complicated I'm surprised that candidates could actually finish it in 50 minutes. It was a full-blown project with multiple files and many additional hidden files that were imported. You weren't supposed to touch or worry about them.

Clicking between multiple files, debugging, and running code in a CodeSignal environment was an insane overload on my brain. I had to swap between four files in CodeSignal. Using an online code editor for IDE work is pretty impractical.

On top of that, they had a database mocked in one of the many CodeSignal files. Obviously, you can't connect to an actual, real database in the interview sandbox. So you had to pretend it was a working database and make modifications to it while ignoring most considerations you would have for working with one.

Thank you for spending the time to set up this project for candidates to make it seem realistic, but who actually completes these in 45-50 minutes?

They over-invested into fitting a square peg into a round hole (making CodeSignal "more practical"), and the application itself is not simple. Both of these points put a huge amount of cognitive burden on the candidate. Not only that, but my interviewer struggled a bit to explain what exactly they wanted me to do in this project.

Complex problem in CodeSignal.

Get very familiar with the editor because you'll have to work with multiple files, debug, and whatnot in it.