Standard interview track: recruiter, hiring manager, take-home assignment, panel interview. Four interviews were scheduled, two technical on the first day and two culture on the second day. I was told that I would only take the second day interviews if I passed the first days, but figured I couldn't bomb that bad. The first interview was an hour to go over the take home assignment, in the form of a github PR, and then add a new feature to the assignment in paired programming (saying it was ok if we weren't able to finish within the hour). The interviewers complimented my thorough PR and we successfully completed the entire task with time for questions at the end. Before starting I ran through my approach on how I would complete the task, which worked as expected. The second interview was a little weirder. I was just given one sentence (see interview "question" below, a direct copy and paste of what I was given) followed by an awkward few seconds of silence. I was told that this is usually a whiteboard exercise, but since this was a remote interview they gave me a Google doc to take notes on instead (instead of, you know, the many online whiteboarding applications.) Because the "question" was so vague I asked a lot of questions and made a few false assumptions, which were immediately corrected and the discussion continued, but otherwise I felt like the interview went well. No more than an hour later I got a rejection. I was offered a call for feedback, which I was happy to take. I figured the issue was going to be with the architecture interview, but I couldn't understand how it went so bad that I wasn't able to take the culture fit interviews (especially given how quite literally everyone said good culture fit was the number one thing they looked for in a new hire.) The feedback I got was like it was from another reality. They said I wasn't prepared for the PR discussion (because I took 30 seconds to reorient myself with it?) got stuck during the paired programming (no??? was it because we discussed whether a poorly worded function meant one thing or another?) that I didn't ask clarifying questions during the architecture discussion (literally impossible not to) and didn't think high level enough and got too concerned with a discussion on network code (interviewers gave literally zero indication of what they were looking for. I'm an app developer, I talked about the architecture of the app. Not the architecture of the backend server protocol.) After receiving feedback, I tried to voice my concerns, but was cut off and hung up on. I've been in many interviews over my career and I can honestly say I never came away feeling like I had been backstabbed before. If there is one bright side to all of this, they saved me a future of having to work with these people. There are multiple reviews for iOS roles for this company within the past few years. All negative, all true, save yourself the effort.

I interviewed awhile ago but decided to post a review now because I had the same experience someone else did so apparently, it’s still an issue they haven’t resolved. For the take-home assignment, the required tasks are hidden under the issues tab on the GitHub repo with no mention of this in the README as someone else stated. I also made assumptions about what was required based on the README and only after spending hours coming up with what I thought was a reasonable solution, did I happen to click into the issues tab to find screenshots and specific instructions. By that time, it was the night before my on-site interview was scheduled (they schedule these without first looking at your take home) so I scrambled to do the tasks as requested and ended up working until 2am to complete it meaning I was mentally wiped out and not well rested for the actual interview. The on-site then consisted of a system design interview, a “pair programming” follow up to build upon the take-home, then a few behavioral rounds. The “pair programming” round was not pairing at all. In hindsight, I realized that I had made some bad assumptions about how they wanted me to handle the data so the interviewers sat in silence while I fumbled around. When I would ask something like “Does that sound like a good way to go about it?”, the response was always along the lines of “If you think so.” which was not helpful to get me on the right track at all. I failed miserably and knew it. I then had to talk to a bunch of other people about why I thought I would be a good fit.