Front interview questions

The standard process starts with a recruiter call, followed by a conversation with a hiring manager about your past experiences, what you're looking for, etc. Then, you complete a take-home exercise that is supposed to take no more than 4 hours. However, if you really want to pass, it doesn't matter how many hours you put in because if the interviewer doesn't like your approach, you'll receive a generic rejection email. Their take-home exercise involves building something similar to their main product. However, the instructions are vague (perhaps intentionally), and I even noticed a few typos. Without clear guidance on handling edge cases, candidates are left to take their own approach, which may not align with the interviewer's expectations. Overall, it took me 3 weeks to get to this stage, which felt like a waste of time. If I had passed this round, the next step would have been an onsite interview.

1. Recruiter Call 2. Hiring Manager Call 3. Take-home assignment 4. Code Review 5. Onsite Recruiting call and hiring manager calls were pretty standard. The take home assignment was to build a data layer for a frontend application. You have a handleEvent function that receives events and you have to update the applications state accordingly. The guidelines for the project were kind of ambiguous and the directions emphasized not getting a 'correct' answer. Even after I asked specific questions, I was told to handle everything the way I see fit and they weren't looking for a correct answer. After turning it in, I was rejected before the code review because they didn't think I handled one of the edge cases. I did, and could have easily explained this in the code review. I guess they were looking for a 'correct' answer. This is a smallish company still and it looks like they're just looking for people who write code in a very specific way. Unless you are a referral, I wouldn't bother going through the process. It wasn't the most ridiculous thing I've seen in an interview but I would definitely put it in the 'waste of time' category.