Applied through TripleByte. Had a total of five 1-hour sessions with different members of the team. I was also asked to give a 15-minute lunch and learn presentation (open to the entire company) on a past project, which was a fun and certainly unorthodox exercise. I spent a lot of time and effort on it (it is a presentation after all), even though it seemed like they were able to rule me a no-hire prior to that. They mentioned a few days prior to the lunch and learn that lunch was on Trinsic, which is a very nice gesture, but there was never any follow-up with that. It’s fifteen bucks or whatever, not a big deal, but to me it’s such an easy thing to get right- just email a $15 GrubHub code and call it a day. It was difficult to get great information about technologies/languages/frameworks in use, how their SDLC works, pain points, and so forth, because much of the team seems to have only been with the company for a month or so. The CTO doesn’t actually start until July and is still with his old company. Even for a startup, this is a yellow flag to me. It suggests the founders might be too picky with who they hire and are sacrificing the company’s ability to ship code (a common “pain point” I heard from everyone I spoke with was that there is too much to do, and not enough manpower to do it). I don’t know if this means anything, but it was interesting to me that an employee with extensive experience as a CTO and other similar roles at multiple prior companies, is actually an individual-contributor software engineer at Trinsic, while the future CTO’s experience is very much “individual-contributor software engineer”. Common sense would have me swap the two, and I wonder what the reason is for this arrangement. The interviews were recorded without my consent (hey, it’s legal). I happened to notice an automated message along the lines of “recording started” in the Zoom chat after my second or third interview, and noticed it thereafter. I would have consented if they asked, and it struck me as dishonest that they have apparently made the conscious decision that interviewers will not mention to candidates that the interview is being recorded. My guess is that, considering the relatively-short average tenure of the team, interviews are recorded for the CEO/co-founders to review, and perhaps it is they who make the hire/no-hire decision (certainly not unheard of for a company of this size). The cherry on top was the completely useless feedback given to me via email, along the lines of “the synergies did not fit”. I recognize probably better than most the dynamic of a startup, and I know the wrong answer to just one question is enough to disqualify a candidate, but if vague “non-feedback” is all you are able or willing to give to candidates, the ethical thing to do would be to shorten the interview process, or consider coming up with a more concrete hiring process that perhaps does not rely so much on gut feeling. This was by-far the most impactful rejection email I have ever received, because I really wanted to work for Trinsic and they didn’t seem like the sort of people who would reject candidates in this way. It’s unlikely that I will find another startup with this tech stack and this sort of product offering anytime soon. I freed up my schedule (including taking PTO and cancelling an appointment) to accommodate the interview schedule Trinsic had put together. Holding down a day-job while looking for another job is difficult as it is without needing to set aside collectively 8-12 hours for a single company, especially when there’s no valuable feedback provided at the end. I could have spent half the time doing mock interviews with former coworkers and still not have a job offer, but at least I’d have helpful feedback. Had I made it past the interviews, Trinsic would have me work part-time (after my day-job of course) for one week to be “super sure” about the fit. I don’t know how I feel about this. I suppose my answer would depend on whether I was compensated for my time. If I had made it past that, as a new hire my first official week would be PTO, which they refer to as “Think Week” (an opportunity to reset between jobs and ask one’s self PDP-type questions). I have never heard of this concept, but I think it’s a really neat idea. The cynic in me wonders if this is a policy because of the one-week “work trial” that would be preceding it, and maybe that’s how Trinsic justifies it being an unpaid “work trial” (My money is on it being unpaid, since it wasn’t specified one way or the other). Imagine getting through that one-week work trial and Trinsic saying “Thanks, but the synergies didn’t quite align”.