To preface, this will be somewhat of a long read.
I sincerely implore everyone thinking of applying here to at least take the 5 minutes to read this before you commit to the process.
I was contacted by a third party recruiter to apply for this role. I have nothing but good things to say about my recruiter and everything below is solely against the company itself.
From the very start, I wanted full clarification on their entire interview process. I do this for all the jobs I interview for as it allows me to properly estimate and schedule my time throughout the process. The process I was told was:
1. Initial screening call with a high-level Engineering representative
2. Take-home assignment
3. Potentially a cultural fit/ behavioural call (similar to a topgrading call)
In the first step, I hopped onto a call with a high-level Engineering representative who had a pretty condescending “I-know-more-than-you” attitude. However, as I was interested in their product offering and being able to contribute to it (financial literacy just so happens to be one of my passions), there was enough mutual interest for me to continue.
Then, I was sent a take-home assignment on Codility. This was a timed assignment with a 1hour 50min allotted timer. The tasks themselves (see below under “questions asked”) were relatively simple. However, the Codility web app itself was absolutely painful to use, lest in a capacity of reviewing a candidate’s technical ability. There was no way to debug issues, running test cases can take up to 2 minutes at a time, and the tasks were set up in a way where it integrates tightly with Codility’s local environments thus making it impossible for you to do the tasks on your own IDE, say VS Code, before moving your solution back over to the web IDE.
Additionally, the test cases for one of the tasks were flat out incorrect. For example, one of the requirements was to disable a button when a condition is met. This being a REACT task, I followed best practices and utilized React’s own “disabled” function to check for the condition. Turns out, their test case runs checked for the “disabled” attribute using CSS instead, making me fail on those test cases. What..? This is just one of the multitude of issues I faced while using Codility for this assignment.
Digressing from that, I submitted my take-home and waited. A couple days later, I was provided an update from my recruiter stating that they now want to do a whiteboarding interview as well. Regardless of the blatant lie I was told at the start, which was, “we heard feedback from past candidates regarding whiteboarding interviews and because of that we now only do take-home assignments”, I decided that since I’ve already committed a considerable amount of time, I might as well continue on with the process.
The whiteboarding interview consisted of 2 engineers from the company, running over 2 questions - one algo and another React question.
Personally, I think I did really well on this as well. I had some minor hiccups on the algo question due to nerves but eventually got the answer they were looking for. When it came to the React question, I quickly knocked that one out of the park with relative ease.
That being said, I did have a chance towards the whiteboarding session to chat with the engineers a little and came to really enjoy the atmosphere and culture that they seemed to exude. We had similar views and philosophies on engineering practices, programming languages, etc. All in all, I thought it went very well and was personally expecting an offer at this point.
About 3 days later, I was finally provided an update by my recruiter that the company was not going to be giving me an offer. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement. Everything seemed to be going very well from my end and my requests for feedback have gone unanswered. This brings me to my next point…
Now, I’m not one to pull the race card but I have a feeling that the color of my skin could have contributed to this decision. Looking again at their LinkedIn employee directory, a large majority (90%+) of their engineers seem to be white males. As a POC and visible minority, I can’t help but wonder if this is truly the case.
To summarize, my experience interviewing at this company was horrible to say the least. Combined with the fact that the company blatantly lies to their candidates about their hiring process, I’m also a little wary towards their company practices in the larger scheme of things.
Don’t lie to your candidates. You need talents more than they need you.
Don’t string along candidates when you have no intention of actually hiring them in the first place.
To anyone planning on interviewing at this company - be wary and know your worth. Be prepared for them to add additional steps to the process. There are better companies out there and unless you are white or white-passing, you might have better luck elsewhere.
