A recruiter contacted me saying they were looking for "generalists" with strong C++ experience, which sounded right to me. Unfortunately no mention about the projects because they are confidential, so it's actually hard to understand whether you might be interested or not. I decided to try anyway, so I was asked to complete a written test in two hours, which is impossible as it definitely requires more time. This ends up having a negative impact on your performance as you can make silly mistakes in the attempt to move fast and don't have time to go back. Moreover the questions are sometimes long, poorly written and require a few passes to be understood. In one case they even used totally wrong wording (e.g. "syntax error" in place of "logical error"). Being alone you cannot ask for clarifications. For the record I got the test by email with almost 1 hour delay.
Over the years I've interviewed at both large and small companies, but this is by far the worst process I've come across. The fact that they send you an old messy file by email is unprofessional, the test itself makes no sense, I'm not sure what "talent" is supposed to select. No questions about C++, threading, design, etc.; the questions about algorithms (but one) are largely too simple to be meaningful, the rest is basically portability, which is nothing really hard and which I doubt can be considered a good criterion for selecting people anyway (BTW I do have some experience on it). Apart from the test, they don't seem to care about you (they never asked my CV until after the test!) and the process seems designed to reject people that could actually perform well. They probably give you little time to make impossible to copy from other sources, but it's the wrong approach, and the only right solution is to have a real person interview you, like other companies do. If I invest my time for us why shouldn't you do the same? I wasted more than 3 hours while they probably spent 15 minutes reviewing the test. This asymmetric approach and consideration of time demonstrates very little respect for candidates and their time, and doesn't actually allow for a proper investigation. It's just superficial and unprofessional. Moreover the feedback I received sounds like an insult. The whole process is amateurish, this company does not know how to interview people or do not care to do it properly.
