Note: I've noticed that Auth0 has been replying to these reviews saying that they are trying to improve, but I doubt that they will actually follow through with that. If they show that they can fix their mistakes, I'll retract this note.
They sent me an email asking about my proudest achievement, an article I find interesting, my favorite feature about Auth0, and they asked me to create an interesting hack on webtask.io
They did not specify how long I had to complete it. The email said that it should take 2 hours to complete, which made it seem that they wanted a quick reply; like within a day or so.
I started on a hack on webtask.io and after working on a hack for a while, I stopped due to how buggy webtask.io was on multiple things. Since I was not sure about how long I had to reply, I reached out to the interviewer telling him about my difficulty with webtask.io and about how I had invested quite a bit of time and wasn't sure about if I should start another hack or not (since I wasn't sure how soon they wanted a reply). He kind of brushed off the webtask issues and said that we can end the process here if I wasn't interested. I replied asking how long they need a reply in and he said that they allow for a week after the challenge is sent.
Since I still had some time, I spent some time on another hack inspired by an example given on Auth0's blog, which explained that one candidate made a tic-tac-toe AI for their hack. Because of this, I decided to make a hack for 2048 since that was a much more interesting and complex AI than tic-tac-toe was. My hack worked perfectly fine with webtask-cli, but when I ran it on webtask.io, it had network issues. Because of this, I emailed the interviewer again explaining that I had spent time on another hack and just needed to tell him that webtask.io was having issues and that there were some possible tweaks I could make to make it work (but not as well) on webtask.io (things like having it just do one move at a time).
Within an hour, he replied saying that they decided not to move forward. I was disappointed that I had spent so much time on the hack only for them to reject me before even seeing the hack. I replied back urging them to at least see the hack, since I had spent so much time on it. I also apologized for asking too many questions, as I thought that me bringing up webtask issues may have annoyed him.
The next day, he replied basically saying that they don't like candidate asking questions because they want candidates that are autonomous. I explained that I could have worked autonomously as I do quite a lot, but I thought it would be best to have clear communication with them, since I didn't want some small thing to cost me the interview. He also said that I shouldn't have done something so creative/complex since that's not what they're judging. Fair point, but I would say that the examples on their blogs imply that they want something creative, which is why I was hesitant on doing something easy. Anyways, they should have made it clear from the start what they wanted.
Worst interview process I've ever been in.
As some reviews have mentioned, all of this work was done without any mention of their salary range. Seeing that they pride themselves in their transparency, you'd assume they'd make that clear right away like other non-transparent companies do. Also, you'd assume that they'd mention that they don't want questions to be asked.
