Standard interview that ended very abruptly after 10 minutes - was rudely told by the guy interviewing me that they are looking for “smart people”, which seemed to be a bit of a Freudian slip, as he quickly corrected himself to say that they are looking for people with more experience in Java. At least the experience was brief.

I was contacted by HR on a hiring platform and decided to take a first interview. She explained Echobox is growing a lot and aiming to double their employees next year. I explained the job was of interest to me and decided to take next step which is an off line task to be completed within 4 hours. The task is automatically scheduled so you can receive it whenever you want. Well the task is quite difficult, it is about understanding how twitter's character count of a tweet works. I think that if you are not into this kind of subject, it doesn't make much sense to do it. I mean it can take a lot of time if you are not either a genius or someone who has largely worked on that matter. So besides the fact that i was not able to do it, i am asking why a company requires candidates to do it. Well i think because they are looking for someone who is re-inventing the wheel for them and is able to provide (more or less) the same solution they came up with facing a similare problem. I understand companies don't have time and resources to do recruitment, but i think hiring process should be a mutual exchange of informations. So after submitting the task, i received a message like thanks for taking the time but we are not progressing further... What is my experience with that? What is echobox experience after that? I learned none and echobox is just sending the task to the next candidate hoping to find the genius. I think companies should test matters like OOP, TDD, Software architecture, etc and besides that why are you contacting me if i don't have experience with e.g social or similar if you are expeting me to solve a problem about twitter with which maybe you spent months before using it as a task challange? Hiring process should be as linear as possible, so i suggest to go through this process only if you have a strong experience in social's matters and if you also have four hours to spend on a challange, otherwise there is no learning here , which should be always the aim of meeting a company