I was given a task three days prior to the interview. It was described as something you shouldn't have to invest more than an hour into.

The task was about reviewing a PR in GitLab's codebase. All the coding should be done in the live session.

The task itself didn't have any specific instructions, so it was more of a free-style code improvement. It was a bit confusing, and I failed to show my skills to the full extent.

I was very irritated about it because I do have the necessary level and actually like everything about the organization.

The backbone of the client is rendered with haml, and a Vue instance is attached to it. The task was a bit obfuscated, and as it turned out later, there were two parts to it:

1. The HTML was awfully syntactically wrong, and that was the first opportunity to make comments and improve the code.
2. There was some vanilla JavaScript in the Vue file that needed to be converted to Vue.

I missed the second part in my preparation for the interview, and that was the reason I failed.

I got nervous, froze during the interview, and I wasn't given a second chance.

Fifteen minutes after the interview ended, I realized what I did wrong, corrected everything, and made some suggestions. I fixed the unit tests and the failing CI pipe, but there was no reply on my actions/email, and I felt like I was cut off cold turkey with no feedback from the tech lead at all.

Now, that's a bit harsh.