Did an initial interview after the company reached out to me directly. During the phone interview, no one was really interested in talking about how I can help solve their technical problems, or ensure maintainability of the code, or help with the speed of iterating through different solutions. I was given canned answers about the company instead. When I tried to talk about data engineering, my points were waved away, because they “didn’t really need scalability” and that what was really key for the job was making “visualisations” for the scientists. (Mind, it wasn’t a Frontend-only role). Got rejected on the basis of “other candidates having previous BioTech experience”. No comments on my engineering abilities. And we didn’t talk about BioTech at all during the interview. It’s like getting a “no” from Spotify because other candidates could name more music bands than you. This tells you something about the engineering culture. All in all, the mission seems great and I wish them all the best. But as an engineer, I wouldn’t waste time on this one again. Advice: - be a bit more diverse. If you reject people from non-research environments right off the bat, you’ll miss out on the latest know-how from the IT industry. - software engineers are able to pick up domain knowledge as they go along; it’s called a growth mindset

Take home task was so specific to the business the company is in, I felt like if I completed it it would be free labour for them. So I had to say no and stop the process.