TLDR: Not a serious company, basically half cringing/half laughing the whole time for days -- read on to make your own conclusion.
START:
Cruise Recruiter reached for interviewing a WebGL role in React.
RED FLAG#1:
Didn't hear anything back for 2 weeks. Assumed they were ghosting me.
RED FLAG#2:
The original recruiter got back with apparent sincerity & the claim that the rest of the company was 'trying to email my gmail, but unable to'. I thought that was a pretty funny excuse since I have no problem attracting recruiter spam -- unless Cruise is so incompetent they can't do email or run an SMTP server.
RED FLAG#3:
I had to basically troubleshoot their email problems by asking for internal emails & their gmail equivalents. Once I started sending test emails, 'suddenly' they responded back with a screen interview date, but no feedback or response as to why the problem was occurring. Didn't really want to interview at this point, but I thought I'd do it just to learn more about Cruise & why they operate so unprofessional & strange.
RED FLAG#4:
Last minute swap of who is doing the interviewing from a Graphics Engineer to some random 'Sr Software Engineer' revealed at interview start.
RED FLAG#5: The interviewing engineer didn't seem to know anything about WebGL. NOTHING. & had 0 passion for tech or apparently anything, but talked down to you like a condescending parent. You know this isn't a serious interview when the Recruiter knows more about WebGL than the 'Sr Software Engineer' interviewing you. I actually asked for his job title because I was getting Product Manager vibes.
From the very start I felt like most of what I was saying was going over his head & this was a fake interview, just looking to kill time & get it over with.
RED FLAG#6:
Tech Question was like a copy & paste from Hacker Rank, but it was odd how ES5 & ES6 were mixed & I had a feeling they wanted a simple function chain solution -- which is fine, but it all just looked like a mess of 'var' & 'function', but without any prototypal design pattern or rhyme or reasoning.
RED FLAG#7: Interview was not conducted properly. First thing I did was open up Sublime to take notes & write pseudo code. When I asked for more details, he just reiterated the first line to create a grid of divs. Okay, but are the divs static? Do we need to swap them with images? Why aren't we implementing this in a shader? Either silence, or this weird condescending tone saying I'm over-complicating it. I even joked, if you want it simple, I can just literally copy & paste divs, but he seemed to think that meant I was clueless. I began to then describe how I had implemented various tile map systems in 2D games in WebGL/C++/etc (including animating tile maps) that would load .tmx or .csv. He didn't seem to have any clue of what I was talking about.
RED FLAG#8: Didn't get a chance to implement any solution. After giving up hunting for clues with where the WebGL was going to be, I asked what kind of generators he was open to using & if for loops would be okay. He said sure. After I said, with for loops you could use two nested loops for rows & columns or one loop with an if statement for total cells in your grid. He said, "I'm sorry you don't know enough about React." Then he pasted his solution in & it was a non-production/hard coded one-liner using array.map() & new array.fill(64).
RED FLAG#8: I told him array.map has performance issues & can create excessive arrays. That it's not used for graphics vs for loops & that's why I specifically asked before using it. The so called Sr Engineer said, "Yeah, memory collection is inevitable in JavaScript" This is obviously someone who has never written or worked with anything graphics related in JavaScript.
RED FLAG#9: He recommended I apply for the Unreal Engine team.
RED FLAG#10: I asked how he was hired & his experience at cruise. His manager friend got hired from a previous company & recruited him -- aka nepotism.
RED FLAG#11: I asked what were the best/worst things about working at Cruise. He said they let you take on things & solve your own problems (canned answer). But they have a massive amount of data the UI team can't parse out properly or load (crazy right?). So I asked if they tried using GraphQL with Hasura vs REST requests (he didn't know what I was talking about). He said they use an API & 'they have people who are supposed do back end'.
The company let's you solve any problem, but you can't even load in LIDAR & car data? Kinda sounds like a big problem? Personally, I couldn't imagine sitting there collecting a paycheck every month looking busy with tons of unusable data.The UI must be a slow-sluggish nightmare -- do they even have a functional MVP? I'm pretty sure they don't have a public facing one & won't for a while.
Investors should pull out & take the loss. The only fix is probably a mass slash & burn layoff against parasitic nepotism & catty politics. Good Luck.