I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Collectly in Jul 2025
Difficult interview
Application
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Collectly in Aug 2025
Interview
After applying to position I'be got an e-mail with link to online assessment.
It contained some "unusual" code snippets, all were quite far from real code and this is not something what I would expect from online assessment.
And last step there was coding task, which was not that difficult, I'm quite sure that I did it mostly right and on any interview with real person it would be accepted, but their automatic system rejected it with meaningless error and suggestion to look at logs, but I was not able to get logs from it. May be it is my fault, but I never had such problems with LeetCode for example.
I suppose this online assessment was something new and worked not very well at the moment when I passed it. May be they fixed something since then, but I think that most people who used it fist just spent they time...
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- in one task there were few functions, interacted with each other, one of which used empty list (mutable) as default argument and it was needed to answer which result will be there after few interactions
- in another task there were something with heavy nested decorators
- something with "yield from "
- something with lambda if I'm not mistaken.
Pretty normal interview process. Started with a zoom recruiter interview then online coding test (multiple choice plus coding) followed by hiring manager interview, at least another round (cultural plus maybe system design?), and final interview with CTO.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Online test was 45 minutes for 10 questions. 9 questions were multiple choice, mostly generic questions like big O efficient, what patterns to use when, etc. One of the questions was a LC easy/medium coding question. All questions had a time limit.
I applied online. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Collectly (Santa Monica, CA) in May 2025
Interview
Interview process was disappointing and poorly designed. I applied through the company website and was contacted by an HR representative shortly after. We scheduled an initial call, during which I shared details about my background and experience. The conversation went well, and I was invited to the next stage — an online assessment.
Unfortunately, this is where things went downhill. The company uses a testing platform that requests access to your webcam and monitors your browser tab activity. If you're familiar with how JavaScript hooks work, you know this kind of monitoring can easily be bypassed — though I didn’t attempt to do so. I was curious to see how it would play out, as this was my first time encountering such an approach.
The test itself was underwhelming. Most questions involved reading through overly complex and intentionally obfuscated code — nested decorators, lambda functions, and other tricks designed to make the code as unreadable as possible. You’re then asked to pick one of four possible outputs. It felt more like a guessing game than an actual skill assessment.
One of the final questions was a simple LeetCode-style problem, but with an arbitrary restriction like “do not use sorting,” which didn’t add value — it just narrowed down valid solutions without real-world relevance.
Overall, the test wasn’t difficult, but the methods used to increase its “challenge” came off as contrived and frustrating. It didn’t measure real engineering ability; it measured how often you write code as short as possible — a practice that would be unacceptable in any production environment.
If this is how the company designs its interview process, it doesn’t inspire confidence in how they approach engineering or talent. It completely turned me off from moving forward.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about your experience? Resolve online assessment with several questions and code challenge in the end.