One of the best interview experiences I've had so far. It started with an alignment interview to learn about my experience and also understand the company and the role. This was followed by a more technical interview to dig deeper into my experience, skills and aspirations (focused mostly on probing into my cv and also addressing technical case scenarios). The final stage was a mix of technical discussions like system design tradeoffs, security, testing approaches, open source contributions e.t.c . All the interviewers displayed great professionalism and the interview atmosphere was always calm and relaxed.

Communication was extremely spotty in scheduling the initial contact. Weeks would pass during which I'd forget I had ever spoken to anyone at Potato and then suddenly I'd get another email apologizing for the delay, excusing it with it having been "another crazy week." It didn't seem like they were very interested in talking to me. Once I finally got to the point where I spoke to an actual person on the phone it went pretty quickly but they were still incredibly disorganized. The technical interview itself was fine and involved a very open ended "how would you design this?" sort of architectural question rather than focusing on how much of any particular framework one has managed to memorize and I enjoyed that aspect of it quite a bit. The folks administering everything were quite junior and unfamiliar with a great many basic practices which I found myself spending a lot of time over-explaining which was odd. I can certainly see wanting to make sure that a candidate can explain things effectively to others but given the fact that I never spoke with any more senior engineers, that pairing choice seemed like a bad call on their manager's part. Sadly, throughout all of the sessions, little ageist comments were dropped here and there about how it would be hard for anyone with kids to work there, how important the extracurricular social activities were to everyone and how there's an occasional game of "beer pong" in the office that all added up to drive the point home that this company is really just a clubhouse for privileged little boys and not at all the creative mecca they aspire to present themselves as. All of the projects they seem to be genuinely excited about revolve around video games and since I have absolutely no interest in video games I didn't think it made any sense to continue the conversation beyond that point.