Front interview questions

A Front recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn. I had a brief phone conversation with her and, while she was perfectly pleasant to deal with, she was clearly reading from a script. Any question I asked that might have led her away from said script was met with artificially effusive praise along the lines of "Oh wow what a great question!" but no real answer to speak of. These were not "great questions" I was asking--they were incredibly basic things like "who's your target audience?" and "do you work with any email provider other than Gmail?" I agreed to talk with a hiring manager in a follow-up call but had fairly low hopes. I was placed in touch with a manager of sorts who had no prior management experience to show for himself and precious little actual engineering experience for that matter. He was also friendly enough but had quite a bit of difficulty answering my softball questions succinctly and seemed to be filibustering in hopes that I'd just forget what I had asked more than anything. I did manage to learn that half the team's in Paris for some reason yet they don't consider localization to be a business priority which was pretty confusing. He said the next step was one of those "take-home" exercises that they expect candidates to spend four hours on just because and I was pretty much in "yeah ok sure whatever" mode at that point. I usually just stop responding entirely once it gets to that but the little problem they threw at me was actually kind of fun and gave me an excuse to try out a newer API I hadn't worked with yet so I went ahead and built what they wanted and submitted it. As expected, they provided zero feedback in their prompt dismissal. Just your typical "thanks for letting us waste your time" email. There's only so much I can say about the company given the fact that I didn't get very far in their process, but based on my experience as well as what I've seen on LinkedIn I feel fairly comfortable saying that it's a cool place for cool kids in their 20s to play "company" and not too much else.

Had to do an assignment before which took some time. Then had a phone call. Thought it was going to be a typical screening but was asked to do a mock. Was not ready for the mock and the lady told me it was not a good fit on the phone. She expected me to be an expert of the product already which was clearly not the case because I thought it was just a screening call.