While the initial HR contact was friendly and prompt in scheduling the first interview, the process quickly became disorganized. Only HR attended the initial meeting, despite a technical person being expected. Immediately following, a coding task with a tight deadline was assigned, focusing on API data processing and filtering. I dedicated significant effort, completing all required elements and even tackling the bonus challenges. The subsequent technical interview with the Chief Engineer and a co-founder offered positive feedback on my task execution, noting only a minor issue in a bonus point related to the incremental load. I was then asked to refactor this small bug and articulate my understanding of the role, with the promise of a follow-up discussion. Despite promptly submitting the revised task and role description, this promised conversation never materialized. For three weeks, I was left in limbo, communicating with a perplexed HR who acknowledged my strong suitability for the role and the excellent completion of the task. The lack of clarity around the 'Acorn platform' mentioned (but not explained) in the job description also made understanding the role challenging. Ultimately, a generic rejection email arrived, citing vague 'concerns' that the previously agreed-upon follow-up could have easily addressed. Although HR was personable and seemingly supportive, the drawn-out, ultimately disregarded process and broken commitment make it impossible to recommend this company. The lack of transparency regarding the role and the failure to honor their word raise serious concerns about their candidate experience.

After the first round with the HR person, I got two homework assignments, one in Python, one in React. When I submitted both of them, the HR person replied me that I should've done only the Python one. The next step was a technical discussion, about my homework assignment. I talked with the person, who had very little experience in technical sector, but lots in operations. We tested my solution for fetching data from the media site API. I talked about my strategies for the retry pattern and overcoming their rate limiter and some potential further improvements with coroutines and async request processing. They obvious didn't know about this and made a weird facial expression. After that they asked me to make a query with a special character, but I forgot to support URL encoding in API calls and their answer was that I couldn't go further, because the fundamentals had not met. After that, they said that I can reapply there after 2-3 years. This was so arrogant statement, because this is not a FAANG or dream company to reapply there.