I applied in Stock overflow, got contacted a couple of days later inviting me for a first stage interview, planing the first chat was challenging, they send you a calendar link with days and times to choose from, but the ones I selected did never seem to suit their hours, most of the companies block the busy dates to then leave the ones really available, is this sense, they don't seem very organized.
I did the first interview with an HR person, we had a relatively quick chat about the company, my experience, rates, and notice period.
After this, I got invited for a technical interview, which first consists of getting an exercise 30 mins before the call for you to solve, the complexity of the test it’s fair for the time giving, it could be done even in less time. Once the 30 mins expire, it was time to have a one to one chat with one of the developers, this person had an intense, opinionated personality about what was to be a software developer, he was one of those performance aficionados, an always overrated topic among developers without denying the importance of the topic, he asks some decent question, but others were about edge cases you probably won’t encounter much in your career or ever, was the type who like to make things sound as complicated as possible so they can look smarter than the rest and feel better with themselves.
After all this, it was time for me to do some questions, I asked “why do you work for this company and not another? why you think this one is special?” one of the reasons he mentions was: “because they do things my way”, not the type of answer you look on an interview ( egocentric one), but hey, he makes sites go fast..
A couple of days after the previous interview, I got invited for a third-round chat with another technical member, this was probably the most comfortable I felt during the whole process, the person who I got to speak with, made questions that had more sense, his ideas and thoughts were more clear and realistic, we had a chat about the potential project, plus how did I approach my skills in some situations, can’t say anything negative about what happened in this stage.
3 or 4 days passed to then get invited to a 4th round interview ( yea, 4th ). Supposedly this was going to be a more “informal” chat as the final stage, without much technical analysis, but things were different. We started having a conversation about myself, experience, personality, etc, the person was friendly and polite.
After this, he asks if I did not mind if getting ask some technical questions? Which made me think, “I already done 2 long technical interviews, why you need more? do you not trust the previous two persons I got to chat with before?” this person did not seem to know much about what was going on in the Javascript land lately, seems like he might have google: “front end developer questions” to then focus the interview base on what he found, some of the questions were about comparing ES5 with ES6, not being aware that ES6 came out 7 years ago, it is probably not relevant to know much about previously deprecated features that are almost not used by most modern app, at the moment we are at ES12!
The same with ReactJs, the questions were about the before hooks version (2.5 years ago) which is pretty much extinct by now, but, not only that, after this, he asked me to do a fizz buzz quiz, hard to believe in the year 2021 some companies still qualify developers this way, I was also told to do it with Typescript when I wrote the previous react test with TS already, after this, plus the other 3 interviews, I felt discouraged, putting half of the effort into the test ( the most boring and nonsense way of qualifying an engineer).
Some days later I got an offer from them, which I wanted to negotiate, raise the hourly rate slightly more, they come back saying I was a mid dev, not a senior one according to their particular process, therefore they could not pay more, even so, I said the offer was ok with me, however after this last chat, I never heard from them again.
You can see they have a lot of hires from Eastern Europe like a few remote companies at the moment, where "talent" is cheaper.
A company you will never forget and you should never apply!
