After a video chat with the hiring manager, I scheduled a time to do an online test for GitHub. In a separate email, I was informed that the test would involve writing a simple NodeJS AddOn, and that the particular task didn't require specialized domain knowledge, beyond knowing C++. The email informed me that the code for the test was developed against a specific version of NodeJS, which was older than the available current version, and that I would be sent a link to GitHub repo, which would be accessible for a limited time. Finally, the email said there were would be a README file that contained specific instructions for setting up the development environment. On the day of the test, I received an automated email that contained a link to the GitHub repository, as promised. I cloned the repository onto my laptop. There was a README file that contained a description of the problem I was supposed to solve and the file contained information about how to run the unit tests to exercise the project that I was supposed to modify, but there were no instructions on setting up the environment to run the project. I spent a significant amount of time and effort just setting up the development environment, as I had to scour the GitHub forums to resolve my issues. I only have a passing familiarity with NodeJS and had never written a NodeJS AddOn, which I admitted readily to the hiring manager, but it was really unfair to have to struggle with development environment set-up issues in addition to having to work with a new technology on a time limited test. That stress over the development environment was completely unnecessary. On top of that, one of the unit test scripts contained an output formatting error. This bug in the test script resulted in the failure of the unit tests because the output lines it produced did not contain carriage returns, even though the output lines produced by the test from the solution logically matched the output lines of the file containing expected output. Given that the expectation that the unit tests were supposed to be a black box, it was unclear whether the bug in the test script was an intentional bug I was expected to fix. Dealing with these set up problems and debugging the unit test script issues ate up a good chunk of the time I was given to access the test repository, and although I solved the problem itself, I was not able to make a clean submission for my test. In conclusion, this test had one of the shoddiest set-ups I have ever experienced. Coding tests should be fun, and while I learned a new technology (NodeJS AddOns are cool!), the stress from the set-up problems with which I had to deal - problems that could have been solved with better instructions - did not make this test fun.

There were a total of four interview rounds: a recruiter screening, a hiring manager interview, and a loop consisting of system design and coding rounds. The interviews went very well, and after each round, the interviewers seemed highly impressed and mentioned that I would hear back from the recruiter soon. However, I was ultimately rejected because the decision came down to a very close comparison between me and another candidate. Additionally, the recruiter was not very helpful throughout the process, which made the experience more frustrating.