I had an initial phone screen for a front-end developer role with a nice person from HR. She told me that $100,000/year was high for that role, but it sounded like they’d pay at least $70,000. I would be okay with a lower salary at a cool company that does a variety of projects and teaches me new things, so I wanted to proceed with the interview process, which initially required a short JavaScript quiz online. After passing that, the HR person sent me a coding challenge. The challenge was an entire responsive page (the Sketch file had both web and mobile views with completely different content in the header and footer), including dynamic data from an API and deployment. The HR person emailed me, “We designed the assignments so that they should not take more than 4 hrs of developer time,” and wanted it back from me within 2 days. My husband has been a tech manager for many years and said he would have allocated 1-2 weeks of full-time work on a page like that. She didn’t ask when I was available to work on this project before she sent it, either. Knowing that this assignment was a tall order, and knowing that this company was expecting a lot of time from me without having invested any of its own time, I nonetheless decided to do the challenge because it seemed fun and I could always show it to other employers. Feeling rushed made the challenge considerably less fun, although they did end up giving me more time to finish. Still, I started to wonder… who decided that this was a four-hour assignment? Is this some non-technical person who is getting a lot of work done for free by pretending to hire? Is this a sweatshop-style company that just expects everyone to deliver things in unreasonable amouts of time without adequate compensation? I was definitely getting suspicious and thinking I had been seriously scammed. After submitting the challenge, they asked me to complete another technical round, this time a phone screen with two guys from India. I was told that the only times I could speak with them were at 8:30am or 7:30am on two specific days. I’m not sure why no one from the Santa Monica office could be bothered to speak or meet with me, but I agreed to do the 8:30am meeting. I’d already spent so much time on their challenge, might as well. After waking up early on a Monday morning, however, I saw a 6:00am e-mail from HR lady asking me to reschedule to another early time later in the week. At that point I was pretty angry - they can’t even keep an appointment for a really inconvenient time that they themselves provided? On top of seeming like a sweatshop, Anatta is clearly a company with some pretty inconsiderate employees. I did agree to interview with the Indian guys at 8:00pm later that day - they asked pretty easy questions (way easier than the initial JavaScript test), but it was hard to understand their accents. I haven’t heard anything from the HR person since then, but I’ve already lost interest. If it’s not a scam, they’d have to pay me way more than they’re apparently willing to pay.