Interviewing for a job at Tineye was overall an extremely terrible process. The HR people contacted me to set up an interview at the last minute and they were extremely enthusiastic about my fast response (I had to say no to them interviewing me at night, I told them the next morning would be fine).
Then I talked to a C-level employee at Tineye for the interview (He is the founder of the company too). He pretended to be friendly and asked a lot of questions – he didn't tell me anything about the position or what my day-to-day tasks would look like, instead they were just asking personal questions unfortunately and pretended to be my friend (he just wanted a drinking buddy from the nature of the questions he had asked).
I asked some questions as well in response and it was clear I made the interviewer sweat bullets. You have to work in downtown Toronto, you need to pay for parking since it's unavailable, and they don't offer remote work for any their positions.
My interviewer became extremely angry after I asked about remote work options (because the actual job description said that work from home was an option and I wanted to confirm), then he started barely answering any of my questions afterwards because that really set him off. He could’ve just answered my question politely and maturely.
Instead, when I asked “Are there any work from home options considering the lockdown?” he disrespectfully said back to me, “Is there a problem?”. Note that if you’re from abroad, Toronto has set the world record for having the longest lockdown due to being extremely populated region with little physical space and new variants popping up every month.
It's clear that Tineye doesn't treat the current climate very seriously, and it's why they're struggling to hire engineers because they don't have any remote work options.
It would be very easy to have an engineer work from a computer at home instead of spend time and money commuting to downtown Toronto every day and not having to risk their life in a crowded office. The engineer position was also for minimum wage and no benefits. After the interview they also ghosted me, and I had to keep emailing the HR people until they finally gave me a generic copy/paste rejection.
My rejection is after I had spent weeks preparing for the interview, researching relevant interview questions and the company history, and after I had spent hours answering their phone calls and doing the interview.
It's a real crying shame because I used to like Tineye when I was younger, they're an old Canadian company and I used to use their image comparison tools frequently. Now there are thousands of apps and other websites you can use for free that does the job far superior than Tineye and it’s adamantly clear their company is suffering and they don’t know what direction to head in.
It also shows you how the “worker shortage” expression is nothing but a myth, these people are just looking for the cheapest yes-man, in-person no-remote, bar-buddy, old-boys’ club applicant and are throwing away hundreds of perfectly qualified candidates.