A great interview process - friendly individuals, really responsive and good at communication. I felt like they actually cared about me as a person throughout the process and that made it much more enjoyable.
Poor interview process. I was asked to create a task which I completed, only to get to the final interview and in the first 5minutes they let me know that the job had already been offered to someone else.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at YuLife (London, England) in Jan 2025
Interview
Standard meeting with principal engineer, home technical task, pair programming session, behavioural/culture meeting.
Friendly recruiter, friendly principal engineer.
Less friendly interviewers (principal, lead, devops) during the pair programming stage.
We spent a majority of the time in the pair programming session going back and forth over needless trivial questions. Despite giving suitable answers, I was met with blank stares and demeaning responses - especially when I asked them to elaborate on what exactly they desired from my answers. You could feel the smugness of the lead engineer who did nearly all of the talking, even when he gave me an incorrect term that I asked him to define (as if I was stupid for not knowing what his incorrect term meant).
At one point I was aggressively cut off whilst answering a simple question.
Ultimately, it felt like the lead engineer had something to prove, the devops engineer didn't want to be there in the first place, and the principal engineer didn't want to get involved.
After wasting 45 minutes of my time, we had spent barely a few minutes actually on my submission. Ironically, if they let me actually go through my work, I would have been able to demonstrate a great breadth of knowledge in their desired areas - it was all in the notes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Extend an existing node service to support some new crud endpoints, enhance security, and improve performance under load.