I applied online. The process took 4 weeks.

The interview process consisted of four steps:

• Initial interview
• Coding task
• Presentation of one of my projects highlighting encountered difficulties
• Conversation with a dev manager

At first, the team during the interviews was really nice and supportive, which made a good impression. I passed all the steps, and 5 days after the last step, I got information about a rejection without any real feedback. After pushing for feedback, I got these two answers:

1. In the coding task (which was the second step), I hadn't included tests. That's correct, but the reason for that is the task description had four things to do, and I was supposed to pick two of them. I picked three out of four because initially, the company seemed very good, and I wanted to show some extra effort. The outstanding task that I left was tests. So not only did I do more than was expected, but I passed this step and moved to the next one, and nobody said anything about a problem with me not writing tests. They gave it as a reason for rejection after the whole interview process instead of rejecting me after this step, which is a complete waste of time and energy. The company is not even able to define their expectations towards candidates.

2. During the interview process, I told them that I like to travel and work remotely, which they said is not a problem at all. But the second reason for rejection they provided was that I said that sometimes when travelling it's a lottery to have a stable internet connection, which is false (I didn't say that). I said that the connection might be a lottery, but I am carefully choosing the places where I stay every time and, for example, I do not travel outside the EU to make sure that I can always rely on my mobile data as a backup plan if there is a connection issue, and I didn't have any issue so far. So I only said that the connection might be a concern, and that I am aware of that to show them that I am being responsible and careful.

Overall, the HR team was nice and caring until there was a chance of me being hired, but later they dismissed me, and I feel like they provided some random feedback just to shut my mouth. It was a very, very bad, huge disappointment and pointless waste of time.

How do you make sure that you stay focused while working remotely?