The recruiter contacted me via email, and we had a brief intro chat soon after that. And the rest of the process was awful. There are 4 rounds.
The first one is a live SwiftUI challenge with 10 small tasks. It was hosted by some 3rd party person, not a Speechify member, and not an iOS engineer. From what I understood this person hosted more than one session in parallel, as he excused himself for missing my question as he was replying to someone else. You're not allowed to use any AI features, nor google stuff, just the official Apple docs. I finished 7/10 tasks and ran out of time. I was encouraged to submit the follow up via email. The session was recorded.
I made it to the 2nd round, which was a debugging challenge. I got a repository with an instruction to find and fix bugs. To be fair, it was an overwhelming experience. Someone was staring at me and I didn't even know what exactly should I look for, how many bugs there are, etc. The stress ate me completely and I needed to abort the session. I was yet again encouraged to submit the solution via email. So I spent 2 evenings fixing all the bugs I could spot, adding comments and unit tests.
Aaaaand silence... I emailed the recruiter after a while what's the status. And all I got was a generic reply, saying that I didn't make it to the next stage, but their policy is to not share any specific feedback.
The next 2 rounds would be the DSA + data flow / architecture for the presented UI (finally with someone from Speechify), and the culture fit / soft skills (with the head of product, or some lead).
The longer I think about my experience the more I'm happy I didn't spend more time on it. I think the process is overly stressful, it measures rather performance under pressure than the real coding skills or ways of working. And few sessions in parallel, outsourced to some 3rd party, no update from the recruiter, and refusal to give specific feedback are IMHO disrespectful.
