Initial stages of the interview process were very positive. Interviewers were kind and down to earth, and very open to having a conversation rather than working through a script.

After two 30-minute conversations, I was asked to do a 4-hour skills project that involved building a simple React application.

My final interview was a code/skills review, where two engineers and I worked through my code submission and reviewed some basic skills. This interview was much more rigid, and the engineers seemed more interested in working through their scripts than they did in having a conversation. At several points, it was obvious that they were looking for very specific answers to their questions and were unwilling to have a conversation about the problem.

As a consultant with ten years of experience, it was very insulting to be dismissed in this way. The answer is never to "add a caching layer"; it's to have a conversation about the problem space and desired outcome and make an informed decision satisfying both short- and long-term goals.

At this stage in my career, implementation details are mostly a triviality. I trust my own process and peer review to deliver quality code, and I'm always ready and willing to receive and incorporate feedback. None of those skills or values were addressed or recognized in the interview.

After a four-week process and a four-hour coding exercise, I received a form rejection email from a glasshouse.io address; the recruiter couldn't bother to send an email from their own account. There was no feedback nor any personalization, and it left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Zapier sounds like a wonderful company, but their interview process does not seem to reflect their ideals. Their process is understandably stringent, but culminating a month-long process in a by-the-books coding interview with no room for error or improvisation is a questionable choice, to be sure. One wonders what the process is really selecting for, and whether that's examined by those in charge; the issue seems analogous to that of SAT scores and college admissions.

At best, Zapier's interview process was a waste of my time.

How would you prevent re-renders in a React component?