I have not received an offer or been passed on yet so I don't really know how the interview went from their perspective. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with LaunchDarkly over the last couple of weeks and at this point am not sure I WANT to work there.

I applied directly to LaunchDarkly. I already knew the company and was excited about their product and the space. After a week I hadn't heard anything about the application so I reached out to someone there through LinkedIn. At that point they were pretty quick to get me started in their process and I had a call with a recruiter and the hiring manager. They then gave me the take home project. They were very clear about not wanting to pressure people about getting the project done in a certain amount of time and said they would check back in with me in a week, which I really appreciated.

The take home involved a backend which was receiving streaming events and then exposed an API for the frontend. The task was to build a frontend without using any JS frameworks that consumed the 4 API endpoints that were available. It was an interesting challenge to do this without any JS frameworks, it's been a long time since I've had to work in vanilla JS. LD was also very clear that they didn't care what frameworks you knew, that it was easy enough for engineers to learn new frameworks and they didn't want to test people for framework knowledge.

After returning the project they asked me to come in for an onsite. The onsite itself was fine, I had gotten a call from another recruiter at the company the night before telling me the details of most of the technical interview questions, which ended up being pretty thorough and was nice because I was able to think through some different scenarios for the various interviews. I did have one odd technical interview in which the interviewer asked me rapid fire questions about React.

E.g. "What are the two rules of React hooks?" and "What are the React component class life cycles?" and "How do you replicate componentDidMount with React hooks?", etc. This definitely threw me a bit since they'd been so careful to communicate that they don't care about framework experience, plus with at least the first question I didn't remember verbatim the content of the two rules but remembered having read the rules a while back when reading the documentation. I was trying to feel my way through the answer and remember the content of the rule if not the exact wording and was cut off by the interviewer so he could read the exact definition.

My experience through this process has not been great. There has been really poor communication from the recruiter that I was assigned to. She doesn't respond to my emails directly most of the time, and she doesn't seem to register the content of my emails at all. I get the impression she was supposed to have called me before the interview to prep me for the onsite, but instead I got a last minute email from a different recruiter asking if we could talk in the next hour or so before the end of the day. When I showed up at their office the recruiter I was working with was apparently WFH that day, but I guess hadn't told anyone, so I sat in their waiting area until after my interview was supposed to have started before someone came to get me.

I also already have an offer from another company and initially LD talked about wanting to move fast because I had another offer, but it has now been a full month since I originally applied. I didn't hear back from my recruiter after the onsite until Friday evening where she casually asked if I could chat sometime the following week. I'd already told LD that I had a follow up conversation Monday with the company that had already made me an offer, and I asked if it was possible to chat first thing Monday morning before this other phone call. Didn't hear back until Monday afternoon where the recruiter ignored my concerns and said she could chat Tuesday.

This is of course a very individual experience, but I just feel a total lack of consideration or thoughtfulness. I'm not sure if or how that translates to employee experience but I typically look at interviews as the company's opportunity to convince me to go work there, just as I'm trying to convince them they want me. Instead they're convincing me to run away.