The interview with the recruiter went great, Lilly is a very open and professional headhunter and represented Appsfactory as a very promising and aspiring IT agency, but was very disappointed. The technical interview consisted of a technical discussion followed by a live-coding session. Pretty standard. The conversation itself was straightforward — mostly about my previous experience and the company’s projects, and we seemed to match perfectly in this aspect, especially when talking about complex technical decisions and frontend standards. The live-coding part, however, came with several unexpected issues: Prettier was misconfigured, making formatting unreliable, and updating JSX, or styles without proper formatting slows down the development greatly, especially working on someone else's IDE ESLint rules were misconfigured. The task description’s markdown was broken, so it had to be read in raw form. Two styling systems coexisted in the same project, unintentionally, so while you focused on writing tailwind classes, they never worked until you figured out that it was misconfigured. The development backend frequently crashed, making it hard to validate progress, especially validating error states, loading states. No time was provided to explore the codebase beforehand, and the entire coding section lasted only about 20 minutes. Despite completing the task and explaining best practices, I was rejected, with the feedback that I wasn’t ‘open’ or ‘inclusive’ enough when raising these points. It felt less like a test of engineering skills and more like a cultural fit assessment — and perhaps a mismatch in expectations. It was nice, but I think the position is more suitable to fit acceptance criterias, and not fixing issues constructively, or focusing on best practices.