Vimeo posted in Hacker News' monthly "Ask HN: Who's hiring" thread, so I ended up applying online.

A few days later, a recruiter got in touch and set up a phone call. The phone call was your pretty typical HR call - what are you looking for, blah blah. The recruiter will ask the salary question early on though, so be prepared for that.

After that, the recruiter sent me a coding exercise to complete. The coding exercise is very vague, but you have to write a front-end to some random endpoint in Vimeo's public API. There were no other requirements.

As a front-end dev, I went the full gamut and set up an Express app that proxies to Vimeo's API using their node.js library, and then developed a Backbone app with Pinterest-like columns on top of that. It took the better part of my afternoon/evening, say 5-6 hours or so.

And this is where things start to go sour. The recruiter took 2 weeks or so to get back to me, and this is after having to send a reminder email. If you give me a coding exercise that vague, spend 6 hours of my Friday afternoon, and then not respond, you're setting yourself up for a very unhappy candidate.

However, the recruiter finally got back to me and set me up for an in-person interview with a hiring manager/senior back-end engineer. I couldn't do the in-person interview, so we settled for a phone interview.

The phone interview with this hiring manager was about an hour or so, and the hiring manager asked only soft questions, such as:

• what do you do for fun
• what's the most special thing about you

Infuriatingly, my coding exercise was only mentioned for a few brief moments. In addition, the hiring manager was eating breakfast during the entire phone call, which meant that the hiring manager was only partially attentive. Overall, no technical questions at all.

A week later, I got a rejection email from the recruiter. Of course, I only got the reply after sending a reminder email.

If you're an engineer, I would highly recommend not interviewing here. The recruiter isn't prompt, they give you an extremely vague coding exercise and then ignore it completely, and you get the sense that the hiring manager does not respect your time. While I'm assuming that the hiring manager was looking for team fit, I would have liked for team fit questions to be asked before I spent my Friday evening on a coding exercise.

Overall, very negative experience.

1. What's your current salary?
2. What's your salary expectation?
3. What do you do for fun?
4. What's the most special thing about you?