tl;dr - High expectations without adequate compensation to risk working for small company that interviews like this, it's a classic recruiting problem and companies like this claim theres a "talent shortage". No, there's no talent shortage, wanting to hire devs that interview well enough to work at big tech or offer below market compensation - pick 1, not both, especially in this talent market. I encourage you to track KPIs on whether your hiring practices actually determine a candidate's ability to deliver and be promoted. We all know dev hiring is broken. It's disappointing to see another company that knows it's unnatural, but follow suit anyways and run their loops like this.
Pros: Nice people, they acknowledge that interviews are unnatural and do not reflect real working conditions. They tell you whether or not you passed during the interview, and they are one of the few companies that have no on-call rotation for a public facing product. 11/10 would work with anyone I spoke to.
Cons: TBF, their rejection was completely valid - for a regular dev role though, not staff. Since the position was open since Feb 2022 (4 months+), that already set off alarm bells for me. Cameras on culture with all day video + audio "rooms", salary range is low for responsibility, there are other established F500 companies that ask for less, have a less or equally rigorous code heavy interview process that pay more base and offer shares you can sell for cash every year. They pay a senior range (125 - 150 base) for staff level responsibilities. They are also a recession-prone business, they laid off 20% of their staff in 2020 because retail suffered due to COVID. Based on the existing glassdoor reviews, there are more cons than pros. Double code screening is weird, proper staff SWEs barely write code anyways. Even seniors barely have time to write code. Daily standups, weekly 1:1s, too many meetings imo. For reference, we have 1:1 biweekly, standups 2x a week, other companies have standups once a week.
