4y
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback and I apologize that you had a bad experience interviewing with us.
We are constantly iterating this process, and your feedback is valuable and will provide a better experience for future candidates.
To your specific points:
- Typescript vs Vanilla JS - We don’t ask specifically for Typescript from applicants. If someone has no Typescript experience this isn’t a blocker for us. If we had the test in Typescript rather than Vanilla, we’d be excluding more candidates. That being said, given the exercise is more about interpreting business requirements than advanced language specific coding, we have considered opening this up to a scripting language of the candidate’s choosing, and will review this again in light of your comments.
- Time available to do the exercise - This is something we feel very strongly about. The purpose is to protect your time. We have all done tech tests which say they should “take an hour” but end up taking five! As you rightly say, we go out of our way to state that many candidates do not finish the exercise and that is not a blocker to progression. This is to try to alleviate pressure. Additionally, an important aspect of this exercise is to understand how candidates make decisions about where to spend a limited amount of time to deliver the highest impact and biggest value.
- Candidates not progressing to the next stage - candidates don't tend to do well in the subsequent exercises if they fail to reach a particular bar here. We want to be respectful of everyone’s time and end a process when we have enough information to make a decision about a potential match.
- Code feedback - When I read your review I was shocked to see that you had not been provided with feedback on your code. This is absolutely the least we can do after you have spent the hour completing the exercise, and we’ve fallen short here. I’ll be following up internally to try to understand how this happened, and ensure it doesn’t happen again. If you would like a session to cover off the feedback, please reach out to stephen@elliptic.co.
