Full disclosure/bias upfront: The hiring manager asked me to write a review under the impression I would write a positive one (sorry), the CEO/COO and said manager are brilliant, my girlfriend went for a job here and she was rejected. With that out of the way. This was an interview of extreme contrast, many highs and an awful low. First impressions were brilliant. Hiring manager was refreshing, professional and talked to me like a human. Secondly, while I waited to start, the CEO came up and started chatting to me...wow. Sharp man, we went into a room and there was some strange level of mind reading going on, he seemed to finish my thoughts before I had them. This guy really knows people and, though it was only 15 minutes, he's a CEO I would certainly get behind. Extreme high point... I was very excited. The conversation with the CTO brought that crashing down. On the face of it he seemed like the rest of the company, professional and sensible. He presented a problem, which is great, but then kept forcing me to solve it using only one way. I kept saying, this is not how I would do it, but he was insistent. Then he changed part of the question on the fly which really confused things, but then insisted he hadn't changed it. There was constant interrupting and he kind of answered the question for me without giving me a second to think. It was very stressful, uncomfortable and demeaning. It peaked when I discussed variable types and he said I should set a JavaScript type as a floating point. I said this wasn't possible as JavaScript doesn't allow you to define different int types, (all ints are floating points). After double checking, he was wrong. He snapped back it did. As he put more pressure on me I was finding it harder to think which made him put on more pressure... I saw this loop leading to bad outcomes... I had to stop the exercise and sit down. Then he took it to a cruel place. After that he asked what I've read, and after I named a book and him not really listening, he plonked a 400 page book in front of me with a patronising gesture, and said to read it without asking if I actually knew any of the concepts in it. He had made his mind up, I knew nothing. The conversation was a textbook dominance hierarchy game This was then followed by a rude and again patronising statement of: "we're looking for chefs here not cooks, you're a cook". Either way this left me feeling absolutely awful. The guys an old school bully, he wants to see a computer science masters degree, someone who proudly programs in C/C++/C# which I'm sure he does, owns a shirt saying "real men program in C" and someone to dominate. Learning under him could be brilliant but tyrannical... My girlfriend had a far less intense experience with him, but the sentiment was similar from her, slightly patronising, and she said she wouldn't feel 100% at ease having him as her boss. Benefit of the doubt, he could have had a bad day. Also, to be fair, it could have actually been the test to see how a candidate would deal with someone trying to throw their weight around and test if a candidate could dig in their heels when they heard a CTO say something technically wrong. I considered leaving, but then I met the COO and a developer. Right back to normal... weird... but at this point there was no real chance to salvage this. It was more of a values discussion, similar to the CEO, very affable, didn't pretend to know things he didn't (technical), even inspirational, sensible and asked good questions. I failed this stage and the reasons I think were mostly justified, I didn't answer his straight questions (and tried to laugh it off) and I misrepresented my view of wanting to program completely alone. Ideally I would have liked someone to grill me on JavaScript, but that wasn't the thrust of this stage. Another high point. Left the place feeling weirdly impressed, insulted, reflective and though embarrassing to say, very depressed. Now comes the amazing bit. Needless to say my spat with the CTO and (fair) values mismatch put the breaks on moving forward. The hiring manager called me up and talked it through with me with feedback. Thats real character, dodging having to make that call is an easy thing to do. Unfortunately my girlfriend did get an email, so not 100% amazing, but still... Extremely impressive. On that, writing this was a struggle, its not fun putting out negative stuff like this, but I have to tell you, dear reader, what you're in for. I have really tried to be fair in this and, though I know it would be easy to dismiss this as a cliche narrative "some guy who didn't like the CTO", that would be too easy. To be clear I think working at Aire would be amazing, everyone I met was great, awesome offices (partly under construction) and smart people. But... put someone between you and the CTO, better yet multiple people... maybe even a physical barrier.