The recruiter was polite, but very forgetful—every interaction required a follow-up reminder. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are understaffed in that department.
The interview itself was not really at all challenging, but uniquely stressful and unclear. This is most likely chiefly due to the current remote context, but the evasive and outright rude behavior of some of the interviewers was frankly surprising.
On the first round, you are given a task to recreate an existing webpage design and walk them through it. Obviously there is no way to complete it within an hour, but they want to see your process. I did exactly that, but it felt like they were trying to guide me into a very entry-level “start with mobile” approach rather than let me explain why I took a holistic approach instead due to the context of the design. There wasn’t a lot of curiosity there about my decision-making, just gotchas about why the mobile version wasn’t done first. By the time I got half-way into explaining why I thought that was an imperfect solution, it was pencils down. Too bad, it might have been a fun discussion, but it really felt like they had an itchy trigger finger for “pass” and I threw one right down home plate, regardless of the outcome of my work.
Next, I clearly caught someone on a bad day. They asked me to go ahead and use “whatever” framework I wanted, which begs the question of finding a boilerplated code editor that fits the requirements they hadn’t given me yet. Typically, this is why vanilla JS is used in interview challenges. After spending 20 minutes coaxing out what exactly it was that they wanted and finding a fit, we had issues using the actual template itself. Then interviewer then got mad at ME, shockingly, and asked me to “write a model”. In the framework I chose, it’s literally two or three lines of code, which the interviewer was struggling to believe.
Sensing that the interviewer was coming away with an outcome that was less than ideal, I asked what they wanted to evaluate, exactly. It was a template responding to changes in a router, which is a crazy thing to ask a candidate to just pull out of thin air in 40 minutes unless they are constantly doing exactly that in online IDEs. By the time I started just talking through how routers and views work on my framework of choice, it was time for questions about them. They could not have possibly seemed less interested in answering my questions about their work.
The rest of the day went very well and I had some excellent conversations. I was made to wait two weeks to hear back, even though I was sure that very rude interviewer was going to give a veto. Disappointed in the process here and at least some of the personalities that are part of it.