First interview was an hour intake followed by another week or two to schedule a new meeting with a senior developer. That meeting was enjoyable and the conversation was natural and not robotic. The person was considerate and polite and understood that live coding exercises are rarely a good way to vet someone so we walked through previous work and projects. The next round was not for another few weeks and was another hour long interview with a project manager and another senior developer. It was very difficult to get a read on what a day to day would be like as every response came back as it all depends. Overall this was less human of an interview and more of a cold and calculated review. The developer had no real questions for me and I was told ai would get a call. I got a fourth interview invite a few days later and that took two weeks due to scheduling to get two senior developers on a call. This call also lasted an hour and during that call I was suddenly asked to share my screen, look only at the screen, keep my cursor in view at all times, and to disable all AI if enabled in my editor then to start building a project from scratch all the while explaining what I was doing and what I was thinking and why. One of the interviewer had such a thick accent it was very difficult to understand the instructions while the other seemed overly disinterested after I explained that this isn’t how a real working environment works? To that I was told that this is how they communicate and often pair program ( but forgot to realize that your doing this in a vaccume under extreme duress which is hardly what one would call a accurate representation of a real working environment. And for transparency I have built a few applications in my time as well as have published and deployed dozens so the line of questioning and interview tactics of bait and switch as ai was explicit in saying earlier that I don’t find merit in a live coding challenge as they never represent a real working problem. Furthermore we don’t ask doctors or mechanics to perform surgeries for free, so why is it acceptable for this to be applied to developers? Ultimately the experience showed me their true colors and I had no interest in going forward with this company after this experience as they seem to only want rank and file employees who will follow trendy coding methodologies but ignore curious and independent thinking. They look like a cool and forward thinking company but after 4 interviews I have seen they are disorganized and their internal development staff appear to be lacking any enthusiasm, not a company I would want to work for or people I would ever want to work with.
