I was contacted by the team manager and invited for a phone interview. He asked me about my background, with very specific questions about one of my past projects that he found interesting and relevant to the job. He also asked about my interests and plans for the future, and he explained some logistics about working with Atieva.

The interview went quite well, so he invited me for an on-site interview. For that, he told me that I would be tested in programming, among other things. I spent two weeks preparing and brushing up my programming skills.

During the on-site interview, I wasn't asked even a single programming question! I was asked again about my previous projects, and I also received some questions from basic electrical engineering classes, e.g., Kirchhoff's laws, circuits, etc., which were things I hadn't seen for ages, but I managed to answer them.

I didn't get an offer.

Overall, I found it unacceptable that they asked me to prepare for something completely irrelevant to what they finally tested. It showed a complete lack of plan and coordination in their interview process, which cost me a lot of preparation time for the wrong field.

They do offer hotel for two nights and a car rental, but the hotel was really bad, in a dangerous neighborhood, and the car was rented from a completely disorganized company. We had to wait three hours in line to pick it up. It would have been better to offer fewer but better things to the candidate, because this creates a really bad reputation for the company.

I believe that if the company wants to attract the best candidates, they have to become more organized and consistent with their interviews, and more efficient and careful with hosting conditions.

What did you do in your previous projects, and what methods did you use?

Where else have you applied?