Pretty terrible interview process.

Started with a 1-hour call with the recruiter where she talked for literally the whole hour, giving a detailed explanation about how the AdTech industry works. This was pretty boring and kind of a waste of my time.

The next interview was a half-hour session with the hiring manager, who was nice but didn't have any prepared questions or structure.

However, the thing that really sucked was the next step – their take-home assignment. Normally, I like a take-home assignment because it gives you a chance to spend some extra time and ace the assignment if you really care. However, this assignment was quite bad.

Instead of tasking you to build a small, new codebase from scratch, they instead sent you an existing project, with the only prompt being to "improve" the architecture and visual design of the project.

The existing codebase they sent over was overall messy and buggy, and the instructions were pretty unclear. The recruiter said that they expect you to have a lot of questions and that the people who do best ask questions. This seems ridiculous for a take-home assignment because it's something you often do on your own time and after work hours, so needing to ask your interviewer questions over email adds days of delay to the process.

In the end, I made some assumptions that (I guess) weren't correct, and they said that my work was the opposite of what they expected. I have passed take-home assignments at big-name companies like Twitter and Square, and this is actually the first take-home assignment I have ever not passed.

Even if I did pass, though, it seems like the next step of the interviews was a full day of LeetCode madness, so even after you show them that you know how to code, you still have to participate in the LeetCode circus.

The overall process seems disproportionately long, time-consuming, and difficult when compared with the low prestige of working at TDD. If you can crack the interview here, you should probably go interview at Facebook or Google instead.

Refactor a messy codebase