HR Phone Screen (after ~2 weeks): Standard phone screen
Onsite technical (1.5 hours, after ~3 weeks): I had to follow up to get this scheduled. Manager and senior software engineer conducted an onsite technical interview with mostly trivia (security, auth, JS trivia), with a portion for "debugging" non working React code. Manager didn't seem to have the best/most accurate grasp of some concepts (useMemo vs useCallback, claims useContext is state management), and was happy to keep nitpicking React code debug portion until the senior engineer pointed out the remaining missing parts would've been caught by linters and are superficial. While the interviewers seemed like nice people, the interview experience itself wasn't the best.
Take home coding challenge (immediately after onsite): 7 days to complete a take home frontend coding challenge, implementing various APIs and error handling. Initial instructions specified to not overengineer the project. After submitting the challenge meeting all the requirements and bonuses, I received feedback requesting some changes/enhancements to be made, which was surprising in and of itself. I'd categorize the majority of the suggestions to be out of scope of a take home project, as it would definitely fall under the "overengineering" category, but I implemented them anyway.
Take home challenge pt 2 (~1.5 weeks): Once again I had to follow up to get a response. I received feedback that my code could still be improved in (IMHO) subjective and out of scope ways. It seems like following instructions, whether it's the original one or the feedback ones aren't enough, you're supposed to read the interviewer's minds and realize that they want a small take home project to be structured like a full blown production app. Without giving away too much:
- implement more complex state management because prop drilling 2 levels was unacceptable
- API retry logic not enough, despite the requirements asking for such
Overall a negative experience, both in person and take home interviews had lots of ambiguity and lack of clarity that made it hard to figure out what exactly they wanted, since it seemed like following instructions wasn't enough. During the HR call, it was also concerning when I asked about if English only speakers had communication issues with the rest of the team (Cantonese and Mandarin speakers), and I got a small laugh and "nothing major as of today" as a response.
The whole process took a long time and I needed to constantly follow up on almost every single step to get a response.