A standard interview process, executed poorly:

• Initial call with recruiter
• 1-1 with Engineering Manager
• Take-home challenge
• 1-1 (which turned out to be with two people) technical interview, solely to build upon the challenge – a fairly awkward experience.
• Final interview

The issue lay with the challenge, which was fairly involved in terms of requirements. No code was provided to get up to speed quickly. The problem was that the challenge had a three-hour time limit, which essentially made building a backend to perform API calls impossible. This forced corners to be cut, resulting in an API call made in the browser (to avoid CORS issues) using a service with a hard request limit, which I then hit.

The subsequent technical chat built upon what was essentially a hampered application. The service I used for the API request hit its limit again during the interview, effectively breaking my application. This meant I could no longer complete the challenge. It was extremely off-putting, and I felt myself getting flustered.

For reference, this interview asked me to add recursion into the application. The interviewer had used the same service I did to get around CORS issues in their testing, so I believed it was an acceptable decision. However, this was only asked when we were about 80% through the interview, meaning we ran out of time (which was irrelevant, as my application had already hit the request limit).

I believe this interview could have been great, but Snyk should have provided a basic backend and frontend to start with if the follow-up was to build on top of it. Alternatively, they could have completely removed the three-hour time limit. I don't see any benefit they achieve from this limit, especially considering how involved the task was. Writing "real" tests alone for an application of this complexity could easily take three hours. If they intend to keep the time limit, they should provide a basic application to get going.

There are lots of questions around the technical test and the decisions I made.

Implement recursion into the take-home challenge to make nested API calls.