TradeWing interview questions

There were four steps to the process. First was an intro call with the CTO Doron. He was friendly, and talked about his background and the business as a whole. Next was a 1 hour tech screen. Then a (virtual) on-site. A few coding questions/discussions, but more importantly to me was the virtual lunch. It was an opportunity to meet the team and see how they interacted. It's not something that I had in other virtual interviews, and I think it's a great addition. The last step was a longer talk with the founders, Eric and Doron. They talked in-depth about the business, where it was going, and how I would fit in, and we discussed my background more as well. This was part of what sold me on Tradewing, as it was a great and impressively candid conversation.

Tradewing pinged me on one of the big hiring platforms. I'd never heard of them and the pitch on their site was incredibly muddy but I figured a brief chat wouldn't hurt anything. What ensued was easily one of the funniest interview experiences I've had since the dotcom bubble. The hiring manager began the conversation by lying about having 10 years of experience when he clearly was still in high school 10 years ago. His own LinkedIn profile shows he's had one actual job at Facebook in his life and he was not responsible for shipping anything whatsoever there, so this is one of those situations where you know the head honcho got the title because of who he made trap beats with in college and not because of his qualifications. Sometimes that works out. Most of the time it doesn’t. After exhausting at least a dozen ways of politely phrasing the question "what does your product actually DO?” and receiving nothing but vague, nebulous descriptions of potential revenue streams which *might* exist in the world of professional associations in reply, it became pretty apparent that this person flat out did not know. One minute he was describing a scheme to market insurance plans on message boards and the next minute he was going on about selling tickets to live events. The only thing any of these Adderall musings had in common was the fact that he’d never actually built anything like them before. The interviewer finally got really cranky with me because I wasn't as accepting of the notion that a page full of stock photographs was somehow self-explanatory as he would have liked and decided to passive-aggressively lash out at me with the line “I really enjoyed talking to you up until now.” I could no longer suppress my laughter at that point and just had to hang up. It’s entirely possible that the CEO does indeed have a coherent, articulable narrative which weaves all of these disjointed ideas together into something that can actually be built, but he’s going to need a lot of runway to get anywhere near that point if he doesn’t find somebody with actual experience to execute on it. Tradewing might be a good starter job for someone in their late teens or something.