I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Photoroom in Jun 2025
Interview
Chat with recruiter, then with the hiring manager, followed by a take-home assignment and review of said assignment. Future stages include a half-day panel.
Early stages were good, but the take-home was a miss in my opinion. It’s basically a time-limited task revolving around implementing a few features in a pre-configured project. Before the assignment a lot of importance is put onto being able to independently prioritise features and iterate on tasks, rather than following some concrete steps or completing everything fully. The goal is to have something at a level where it could be shipped to users.
The idea is that the task would then be reviewed together with the team and a discussion could be held.
The reality is that the team has its own preconceived notions about what is correct. Thus if your view diverges, then you may not even get a chance to discuss your choices. Moreover, the team doesn’t seem well-prepared, as evidenced by suggesting to use local storage for images.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement features around browser storage, user interactions and data modelling.
You can see all the negative interview reviews pointing at the same issues. I hope they would reflect on this and improve their hiring process.
I applied via LinkedIn and had the first recruiter call. The recruiter asked me to explain technical questions around MobX and Observer, which I found extremely weird. This is something to discuss during technical interview, not an initial Talent conversation.
I met one of the Lead Engineer, and the experience was super positive. That conversation was the reason why I wanted to progress the interview process with them, even though being forced to do a time-boxed 3h task is something I would never otherwise consider. I think it's a big red flag in term of how engineering is assessed, and either signals to the candidate that:
1. The company wants vibe-coder who can spit out code as fast as possible
2. You will be asked to ship a new feature "yesterday", and this is a way to assess how you perform under time pressure.
Please, consider assessing candidates during a live coding interview, where they get a chance to talk and interact with the interviewer, instead of forcing them to submit AI generated solutions that provide 0 value or visibility into the candidate skills and potential.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Basic cultural fit
- Tech Interview on React and FE architectures
- Take home task with 3 features to implement in an existing codebase with multiple sub-requirements all to complete in 3 hours.