I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Tails.com (London, England) in Apr 2020
Interview
Started with recruiter reaching out to me. A 30 minutes initial discussion with one of the software engineer who asked me about my past experience, my past projects, nothing much technical.
After that I was given an assignment, which as per them was a task for 2-3 hours (There were two problem statements in the task brief, I didn't ask them whether I was supposed to solve, full-stack one or back-end one. So I solved full-stack one despite having less experience with front-end)
Task was not a 3-hour assignment for sure, or I am slow. I didn't make it and I was not given a feedback, I just received 'I didn't make it' through recruiting consultant.
Overall the process looked standard, and would help to assess a candidate, the reason why I am marking overall experience as negative is because they don't share feedback. If a person can spend hours doing an assignment, they can at least tell something about why it didn't pass the bar.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assignment was building a small back-end API and using it on front-end to do a full-text search like you do in Elasticsearch. (Full-stack)
Backend one was to use an external API and use it to fetch certain data from it on a webpage (You can do that in Flask using templates)