I rarely leave negative interview reviews, but this was genuinely one of the most frustrating and poorly run interview processes I’ve experienced in years.

The problems started before the interviews even began. I submitted my availability through their scheduling system THREE separate times because nobody ever confirmed anything. After repeatedly asking whether I needed to resubmit my availability again, the recruiter would simply reply “yes” with zero explanation. No ownership, no clarification, no apology — just complete disorganization from the very beginning.

After finally getting through two interview rounds, I was given a take-home assignment that was repeatedly framed as:

• something explicitly expected to take only around 4–6 hours
• focused on “clear, well-reasoned, and maintainable implementation”

Naturally, I approached it exactly the way an experienced senior engineer would: prioritizing architecture, code quality, maintainability, and sensible tradeoffs within the stated time constraints.

Then came the rejection feedback, which honestly felt absurd and completely disconnected from the assignment itself. The criticism focused on things like:

• missing DB indexes
• no pagination
• simplified password handling

This completely misses the point of a constrained take-home exercise. The issue is not whether those things matter. The issue is that NONE of them were presented as requirements, priorities, or evaluation criteria.

What made the experience especially frustrating is that the feedback itself felt incredibly shallow. It did not evaluate problem solving, tradeoff reasoning, architecture decisions, code clarity, or maintainability in any meaningful way. Instead, it reduced the entire assessment to a checklist of generic production concerns that any experienced engineer obviously already understands.

Overall, the entire process gave me the impression that the company does not actually know how to design or evaluate engineering interviews effectively. Extremely disappointing experience, and ultimately a complete waste of time.

A small test project described above.