I am very wary of IT services companies because of the reputation that some of them have, but they're unavoidable in a first developer job search. I had hoped that mthree, being a European company recently acquired by a major textbook publisher, might be better to work with than some of the more notorious companies, but the further I got into the process, the more uncomfortable I was about working with them.
The pre-screen questionnaire looked like it hadn't been proofread. (The client is a very large, very well-known company, with a very short name, and they managed to misspell it.)
The recruiter emails "What's your afternoon look like," rather than "Would you be available on [date] at [time] for an interview?" It took several rounds of "What's your afternoon look like" and me sending my same, unchanging schedule, to get a time set up for the phone screen.
He called half an hour late.
After the phone screen was a coding test. It was comparable to what I've done for other new grad interviews, and was the only part that didn't raise any red flags. It started with increasingly difficult timed arithmetic problems, followed by three coding problems. The first was easy to solve at first, but hard to solve in a way that would pass the efficiency tests; the second was shockingly simple; and the third was a slight variation on a standard freshman/sophomore data structure. The first two were language-agnostic, and the third had to be implemented from scratch in Java.
Following that is supposed to be a meeting/interview to discuss your resume so you can edit it into mthree's format. After a few more rounds of "What's your afternoon look like?"/me sending him the exact same schedule, we finally got a time set up, but he neglected to mention whether that time was for my time zone or his. I was ready early for the meeting to start in his time zone, and basically wasted an afternoon waiting for a call which never came. He finally emailed me the next morning that he had been in a meeting.
I decided that a missed interview was one red flag too many, and withdrew myself from consideration.
