The entire process took around three months, two and half plastered with “you’ll hear from us next week” emails, followed by no further contact until the challenge.
I was eventually sent it after two months, still without ever actually hearing from anyone. The assignment was extremely easy, although corners needed cutting to keep within their suggested, and (uncommonly) completely unpaid, timeframe. The real issue, though, was guessing their expectations behind the willingly vague request.
We’re not talking “no nudging in how to do things, figure it out yourself”, but purposefully omitting what they actually wanted to see. Adverse selection at its finest, and to their own disadvantage: hiring is difficult as is when looking for answers to questions you ask, but expecting people to guess the answer without even having asked the question is extremely detrimental to the company, not as much to the candidate.
After promising some feedback within 5-7 days and not delivering on it, which has been a recurrent theme, and something so easily avoidable by not mentioning it, I was eventually invited for the first interview two weeks later.
Questions were standard ones, but, shifting away from those, one could easily feel the struggle in they’re trying to keep up with further technicalities they didn’t expect, and possible didn’t even know, in both the live replies and, especially, the assignment.
To more easily abide to their suggested time restrictions, and provide a complete in-app experience, the challenge leveraged SwiftUI and structured concurrency: unfortunately, the interviewers attempt to get into actors, their isolation, and more advanced, although standard and WWDC-introduced, “newer” language features, proved a severe lack in the understanding of said topics, together with a misplaced sense of arrogance in trying to investigate something they “heard of”, but clearly not “grasped”, while passing judgement on it. Again, a bad display they could have so easily avoided, by simply requesting a UIKit app, at the start.
After being explicitly told to expect a detailed report, regardless of the outcome, at the end of the interview, I was sent a generic email late the following day, stating no further interest, with an even more generic and frail excuse, they, once again, should have simply just omitted.
Although I could even try and stand by the structure of the application process (as much as it’s clearly not up to the “we value people” standard they’ve set themselves up with), it’s clear it needs more ironing in the way it gets actively carried out, with far less decoy bells and whistles, empty words, missed ETAs, etc, and possibly a more focused, direct and transparent approach to what they want to see and hear. This way, it sadly feels like they’re not actually committed to hiring anybody.
As per the interviewers, I want to point out that one could easily see their approval for the company (which is always great to find), further confirmed by their far above industry average years employed within it. Unfortunately, it also showed, clear as day, the immobility (“laziness”) this causes in continuously reinforcing one’s own biases in what one knows or doesn't, in striving to actually improve, evolve, which, in turns, explains the outdated feel, basic implementation and performance issues with the iOS app itself, and the urgent need to possibly out-stale ownership and accountability balances and dynamics. For which, to be clear, I’m not blaming the team: based on the members I interacted with, they seemed amazing people and talented engineers, with the hiccups on newer language features and advanced topics excusable.
The aftertaste is one of "disappointment", more than anything else. But the product is good, engineers seem capable, so I'm confident, also in light of the several negative reviews lamenting the same issues with both attitude and hiring process lately, they will absolutely be able to make those few and select choices to fix that, the iOS client, and make komoot even greater.
