LoanCrate interview questions

Very strange interview experience overall. During the live coding portion, at one point, the interviewer accused me of using AI when my IDE was simply autocompleting part of a line of code. The interaction immediately became unnecessarily adversarial. Ironically, after switching to a plain text editor to avoid further confusion, the experience became even more awkward and stressful. Toward the end of the interview, I also asked questions around engineering quality agreements, team standards, and development processes, and the answers were essentially along the lines of “we don’t really have agreements” and “we just need to move fast.” I completely understand startup pressure and moving quickly, but professionalism, emotional intelligence, and mutual respect during interviews still matter. In hindsight, I believe we were probably not a good cultural fit.

I first spoke with the recruiter/founder, then completed the OA, and finally had a call with another engineer. Every review mentioning how unpleasant their interview process is turned out to be spot on—it was genuinely a poor experience. The third round with the engineer was by far the worst. Honestly, I’m not sure how someone with that attitude is allowed to represent the company in interviews.