I applied to the company via a recruiter and the company seemed like a good fit based on my interests, experience, and the job description. The recruiter came back saying they were keen but concerned that I was still inexperienced. I was expecting the first interview (as with most other companies) to be with HR talking about my motivation to join the company etc but was instead with an engineering manager. Off the bat he starts asking technical questions about the company I currently work at - how big are your teams and how many developers are there? Do you have a product owner? What is the process for getting a story into production? None of these questions were about me and my experience and it felt like the manager was assessing my company's methods of working. Apparently the nail in the coffin came when he started asking about our production support model and what my experience was with it and with our of hours support. I explained that during my time as a developer, my team had not had any critical production issues and instead I talked about what my approach would be. This was a major dealbreaker according the feedback received, and they did not believe I could handle working in their company because of my lack of experience. The feedback I received was scathing and sarcastic without an ounce of politeness - if I was so unqualified for the job based on my CV, why bother giving me an interview? They ended by saying my salary expectations were "ill-judged" when I was simply asking them to match my current pay. If this is a reflection of the company's culture and attitude - avoid at all costs.

Interview process was split into 4 parts. Initial interview with an Engineering Manager to talk over experience and CV. Second stage is a tech task, third stage is technical interview and fourth is culture fit. The tech task is very vague and even though the tech task is written like they want a library, what they actually want is a RESTful API. This is not on the task at all and if this is an insight into how the company works, with vague requirements and a lot of assumptions, then I definitely dodged a bullet. I went through a recruiter so I may have been sent an outdated tech task, but my feedback definitely didn't reflect what the task was asking. The feedback was also rather passive aggressive, a snippet of it is "despite claiming to be bored with writing APIs all day, he still failed to demonstrate the ability to write one".