I don't know, man, it was weird.
They've got a blog post which outlines their whole hiring process and it seems like there's a lot to like in it. My experience didn't 100% reflect the blog, because the CTO did my phone screen at the beginning instead of at the end, which is what normally happens. So, he interviews me, and then just spends the first 15 minutes grilling me about why I'm leaving my current position. And, of course I'm sanitizing it and won't come out and say "I want a new job because my current one sucks," but he's having none of it, and just probes and probes and I'm stammering like an idiot trying to justify my job search while all the while being basically forced to complain about my current employer. AND THEN there's maybe 5 minutes of light technical discussion of what I'm good at and what I'm passionate about, then the next half hour is listening to him nerd out about their entire tech stack. All of it. In detail.
"So which part do you think you want to work on?" Uh, wow. I don't know, that was sort of a lot to process.
After several days of feeling like I completely bombed that interview, he actually emails me back to schedule something with another interviewer! What? Oh! Okay! Cool interview with a cool team lead working on a cool thing. Awesome. We schedule the coding exercise.
The coding exercise is basically an awkward Frankenstein marriage of a traditional 8-10 hour homework assignment with trying to simulate working with the team. They put you on a sandboxed Slack channel and tell you to "iterate" with the team while building the application. Interesting idea, but it doesn't really work. The technical requirements were clear but the social requirements were extremely vague. They wanted me to figure out how to fit into their company culture while sealed in a vacuum, and gave me the paranoia-inducing burden of deciding when my code was good enough to demo.
Rating neutral instead of negative because this was overall just bewildering.
