The whole interview process was neither good nor terrible. I expected a bit more from Slack, as it's a fast-growing company. From my chat with both the recruiter and a development manager, I could tell the company feels and acts very much like what you'd expect from a startup.

A few things I quickly picked up were:

• The development process seems pretty loose (not a bad thing necessarily, but there will be growing pains once a company gets bigger).
• Code first, think later (screams "technical debt!").
• A very limited advancement on the technical side of a developer's career. It seems like the only advancement for a senior developer is to go into management, which does not interest me. I'd rather be a solutions architect or become an "uber-level" developer. Not everyone wants to manage projects.

As part of the pre-screening, everyone is given a technical exam to work on for a week. The exercise isn't hard but is tedious and is supposed to be written without supporting libraries. I completed it and worked hard to show my knowledge. I treated it professionally, like writing an open-source project, with all the tests, showed all the code, and deployed it on the cloud. However, no one went to do a walkthrough with the submitted assessment work or even mentioned a thing about it. Very disappointed!

Moreover, the communication towards the end of the process was quite slow. I asked for a status update since it had been a week since the last phone interview with a dev manager, but they pretty much ignored my email until a rejection email days later.

It is possible I expect too much from a startup, since I have been with bigger corporations where HR and recruitment are much more experienced. It just comes off as being very unprofessional.

My advice, if you are reading this: a simple email telling your applicants you are still looking into the application is enough to show professionalism. Ignoring your other applicants because you are still negotiating with another applicant is not really a professional thing to do. It will eventually bite you.

Typical development experience questions.

Ask about your previous jobs and projects.

Ask about development process questions, such as:

• Agile
• Development process
• Conflict resolution

Mostly company fit questions.