IMP Software interview questions

I had an interview scheduled with IMP Software. I joined the call on time and waited, but no one showed up. I emailed the recruiter, followed up the next day, and even contacted the company by phone. Still no response. I get that things can go wrong, but the lack of any communication afterwards was frustrating. A simple message would’ve been enough. Instead, it felt careless and unprofessional.

The people were lovely, and it seemed there is a nice culture there. However, there seemed to be a few strange quirks/red flags. I was off-put by a need to do a Thrive Tech cognitive test to see how well I could recognize patterns in random images and decipher nonsensical paragraphs. However, I figured "why not" - and followed through on completing this task. Maybe mostly because of my fascination of how bizarre this process/questions were. As a designer, another red flag is how the company seems heavily developer driven. Even when speaking to product teams, they insinuated that they had to work really hard to get the designer role approved and that there would be a lot work to managing/educating development teams. So it seems they want someone to take control of design.. but also not stop developers from doing what they want to do. That sounds like an upper-management problem that should be honest with themselves. It is a business strategy to be product rather than a feature driven business (as the interviewers implied that they were.) Even a super mega lead designer cannot change culture without that support from the top. My rejection was based on the fact that I didn't speak enough about engaging with development teams, even though the role was advertised as someone who can help unify different products that were being developed. Of course in my career as a designer, I've had to work across different teams and engineering wasn't one that I just decidedly ignored - especially with my background in SaaS. Ultimately, I feel fortunate that I was rejected - as I think it would have just ended up spending more time dealing with egos and establishing/fighting process on product/design/engineering ownership rather than getting on with the work.