I wanted to share feedback regarding my recent interview experience with Transact (now PathWise). I had an initial screening call with the Senior Director of Software Engineering, which went well. The questions were reasonable, covering system design, scaling Node.js projects, handling performance bottlenecks, and deploying cloud applications.
I was then scheduled for two follow-up interviews, one with two engineers and another with two more team members following that interview. In the first interview, unfortunately, one engineer experienced internet issues and could not contribute fully, which affected the flow of the interview. The engineers asked thoughtful questions about building a complex geo-location tracking system for bus rides, scaling, background job processing, performance optimization, caching, and databases.
I was told during the first part of the second interview that the second set of team members was unavailable due to working on production issues. Despite multiple follow-ups over several weeks and with a response that team members were sick so they were looking for a new date to interview, I was never rescheduled to meet them. After a total of seven weeks and multiple emails, I received a rejection notice saying that they went with another candidate.
Overall, I felt the process was poorly managed, lacked communication, and did not provide me with a fair opportunity to meet all the intended interviewers, despite promises to meet them. It was discouraging, especially since I had prepared extensively and taken time off work for these interviews. This experience has left me strongly discouraged and with little desire to apply to this company again under such conditions.
While I appreciate the initial interactions, the lack of follow-through and transparency made the process very frustrating. I hope this feedback helps improve the candidate experience for future applicants.