TL;DR Poorly organised and fairly unprofessional, wasting candidates’ time with tasks that were clearly not material in their decision-making process. The feedback was not helpful or particularly relevant, and obviously AI-generated.
I was asked to complete an initial screening, a take-home assignment, a behavioural interview, a coding interview, and a final system design interview.
The behavioural and initial screenings were as expected, reasonable and standard behavioural questions.
The assignment was to build a small application using a Ruby on Rails back-end and a React front-end. I spent several hours on it and submitted a clean, well-documented, and fully tested codebase. They did not provide any feedback at all, and it's unclear if it was even used in the assessment.
The coding interview was a bit of a bait-and-switch. The job posting and recruiter indicated that the session would focus on reviewing the take-home assignment. Instead, it was a live coding test. Their reasoning was that they were worried about "AI-generated code" for the take-home assignment—ironic, given that their feedback was likely AI-generated.
The coding test itself was rudimentary, with the stated goal being to "see how I worked.". The task was completed with time to spare to have a nice conversation with the interviewer. However, the feedback claimed I was unable to write production-ready code within the time constraint, which was not a stated requirement, or really feasible given the actual time for coding was about 30 minutes. This makes little sense unless they genuinely expect production features to be completed in 30-minute blocks.
The system design interview was poorly run. It ended up being a mix of system design and what was essentially a third behavioural interview. Only 45 minutes were allocated, and the interviewer joined late, reducing time for meaningful discussion (given other . The session jumped erratically between topics, many unrelated or already covered in prior interviews. It was difficult to get into a flow, and I was interrupted several times while trying to explain trade-offs or walk through my reasoning.
Too little time was spent on actual system design, and too much was poorly allocated to repeating behavioural questions or diving into business context that had already been discussed. As a result, the conversation lacked both structure and technical depth, which was ironically part of the feedback I received.
