I started with a pleasant Zoom call with the hiring manager, followed by a recruiter call that focused mostly on whether I wanted to continue. I was told the next steps would include coding and a take-home project. After I shared my availability, they scheduled four hours of interviews on one day. They didn’t explain beforehand that it would essentially function as a virtual onsite, so I tried to make the schedule work rather than push back too much.
The day began with two fairly straightforward coding exercises and a short conversation. After that, I received the take-home prompt, which became the main event. I was expected to build and present a HIL test management and dispatching stack, then discuss it. The prompt was explicit about what they wanted and told me not to over-engineer it.
My presentation ended with the work passing all the test cases they cared about. The feedback was that I hadn’t gone deeply enough into manual and automated testing details, so I didn’t get an offer.
What bothered me was that the prompt seemed aimed at something that would take weeks to make robust and ready for edge cases, while the evaluation came down partly to how familiar I appeared to be with the exact candidate codebase they had effectively generated. I felt a bit slighted, even though I understood where I’d missed depth.
Location: San Francisco, CA. Overall feedback: Negative. Offer status: No offer.
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