The interivew was: First Get in touch. Then you'd choose a nearest available date from a web site (they were so busy that I the nearest date was set on the next week. Which is completely fine. We were on time and initial discussion went normally. Lady described the company and asked some very broad technical questions. (like what is Class) Second Also on time. We scheduled another interview with the technical guy for another 2 weeks. The second interview went smooth and short. The guy didn't look enthusiastic of this. So he just asked some formal questions. Afterwards he immediately sent an assignment. A coding challenge. I replied with time I would need and submitted a day before the deadline. The coding challenge The coding challenge was confusing. On one hand they expect OOP knowledge, on another hand the task doesn't imply it. It actually more implies how to solve the problem in algorithmic way. No database interaction, no model at all. Just a web service to receive data, transform it and return. There are must do's and bonus points. I did all bonus points (web app - ReactJS app, loop detector etc.) The task was to traverse data and convert it to tree structure. I deliberately coded it non-recursive. (if you know, recursion is not the best choice in this situation for PHP and this type of environment). But since I kinda knew that on average they expect recursion I created a ReactJS app as a bonus, there was a recursion where the use of which was more appropriate. I also added javadoc comments lol because you know, why not. The next day I received ridiculolus email. Stating that the reason why they didn't like code: 1. "You didn't use recursion" (which means they didn't even bother looking at ReactJS app where there was a recursion used) 2. Your variable names were short (like using $i for iteration, $c for count) and other nonsense of this type. He listed a lot of points just for the mass. Because adequately there would be one or two. (like: "you commented your algorithm") or "didn't split your function" (which was short already) This was kinda embarrassing. So I immediately thought. Well, if you didn't like me on the previous interviews you could just reject it right away without giving me this assignment and wasting my time then to just list dozens of nonsense critical points. Also if someones code just is not what you expected, no need to try to humiliate with this nonsense. Do it at least professionally. A few key points and all good. Other note is that he asked about Reflection API (where do we use it). He clearly expected one certain answer: To use to get access to private methods in Unit Testing. This demonstrates that the guy doesn't know that it's such a horrible idea to test private methods. Which makes me think that the guy just expects certain answers that he preprogrammed to himself.