Affinity interview questions

I went through Triplebyte and did very well with their code screen as I was at my home office with my ergonomic keyboard and 27" monitors - a comfortable setup. After an Affinity phone screen I was invited to fly to SF for an all-day onsite. The people were all super friendly, and Ray - one of the founders - took the time to chat with me for an hour. He's driven and passionate (though you wouldn't know it at first glance). The questions were about command-line string parsing, not about algorithms or graphs or abstract thinking. It was a "get it done, fast" kind of interview. My feedback was that I was slower than other candidates. I was on my laptop with an Asian keyboard layout - I didn't practice typing on it before I flew there because I've always had an external 104-key ergonomic keyboard. Whoops. They value speed of coding, not comments and sanity check blocks. Even if you are an average coder, just code quickly! Overall it was a positive process. Keep in mind they keep changing their office location as they grow. Also, if you don't get an offer, send them a few emails politely asking for interview feedback.

TL;DR These guys don't know how to interview. Especially how to interview experienced people. Don't waste your time here. A recruiter reached out to me about affinity. I read about the company and told him I was not interested. So he recommended that I talk to one of their founders and if I still didn't like, then it is OK. It sounded fair. Next thing I got is an interview invite from one of the co-founders. I had to reschedule the interview due to a conflict at work and the only time this co-founder had was at 8 PM on a weekday. I initiated the rescheduling so I agreed. Coming to the interview, he went on for 10 minutes talking about the company and what they are doing, how they got started etc. He described the product at a very high-level throwing buzz words like AI, Smart Contact, Smart CRM etc. I paused him and asked him if the product is a CRM solution at the core just so I understand and comprehend better. He sounded perturbed by this and tried to disagree with me and told that they are building much more than a CRM without giving much detail. Something along the lines of unleashing the power of contacts etc. That's CRM, duh! Anyway, he then asked about my background and asked me to explain a product that I took from the initial stages all the way to launch. He wanted the full scoop. So I started setting the context, explaining the user persona, the problems and explained the strategy in very high detail for a phone interview. He asked a bunch of clarification questions which were fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. Next morning I get feedback that I was not being selected. Nothing wrong there. But the feedback contained words like "he went on rambling for a long time", "I had to ask several clarifying questions to get the answer out", "took way too much time explaining the product", etc... What nonsense is this? A random 20 something out of college, never worked anywhere got funding with a stroke of luck trying to interview someone with well over 13 years of working experience in the valley. Nothing wrong with that either. What these tech bruhs don't realize is that when someone asks "initial ideation to launch" question, then the interviewer needs to have the patience to listen to the full story. I am sure if I explained it in one sentence he'd still have problems with it. Not everything is an elevator pitch. Finally, I asked him what is the durable competitive advantage he has over Salesforce. He couldn't answer it. What they don't realize is that we are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing us. And these 20 somethings should get a real job working for some seasoned people in the business before they could start interviewing other experienced people. Just because you got funding doesn't mean squat in the valley. Everybody and their neighbour had funding at some point.