- Introductory Call
- Hiring Manager Interview
- Follow-up Call
- Hiring Manager Interview
- Coding Assignment
The introductory call went well (a short conversion about the company, the role itself, and my qualifications), so right away an interview with a hiring manager was scheduled for the following week.
Shortly before the interview was scheduled to happen, they postponed it by one week due to the hiring manager having conflicting schedules.
Finally, when the interview happened, the interviewer came across as a tad arrogant to me. However, despite of it, I made an extra effort to be friendly and I was extremely patient and polite.
I've worked with difficult people in the past, so this doesn't faze me, but an important issue here is that software development doesn't seem to be the field of expertise of the interviewer. This person seemed unaware of many important software developing concepts.
This killed a bit my enthusiasm for the role, but given that I'm qualified for it and due to my demeanor dealing with the interviewer, I reckoned that the conversation ended-up ok and that the feedback would be positive.
One week later, I've got no feedback, so I shrugged it off and moved on with my live.
A few days later I was asked for another call. Without much explanations, they asked me to interview with another hiring manager from a different team (and for a different role).
The interview happened the following week and went well. The person seemed more knowledgeable of software development processes and we got along well.
They then asked me to complete a coding assignment (a Django + GraphQL project).
I promised to finish over the weekend, and I did (even though I was busy the whole week at work and tired).
The project is interesting though and it was fun to complete.
They've got a submission on a Monday morning (I wanted to double check my work early in the day after getting some rest for the remaining of the weekend, fresh eyes make a difference).
I could probably have finished on Saturday, but they sent me an outdated specs document. They only rectified the problem Saturday evening.
I believe I did a great job:
- Implemented all the mandatory requirements.
- Implemented almost all optional requirements (even though they were not mandatory and they only asked candidates to complete one if possible).
- I do TDD so I always write tests (my code for this project has 100% coverage).
- Added type hints to all code (excepting Django generated code and unit tests).
- Setup code quality metrics checks with pycov, pylint, and mypy.
- Setup CI using GitLab, which run unit tests and quality metrics checks every time code is committed to the branch.
- Documented the project well using markdown (my command of the English language is also strong, you will not find any broken English on anything I write).
- Created a Dockerfile and configuration so the code could be executed using uWSGI from a docker image.
I have a large number of completed coding assignments under my belt and I get tons of compliments on my code, over 90% of the time, the other 10% I get ghosted.
Unfortunately the later happened with this company. I reckon they might have not even looked at it.
Impossible that they did not get my email (they replied to it after I found out that they sent me an outdated assignment specs document), I just replied to the same email letting them know that I completed the assignment, also I added two of their staff as contributors to my project on GitLab (they asked for that).
It's been over two weeks and they did not even had the courtesy of sending me a rejection email.
I wish I could post a link to my portfolio on GitHub or this particular submission on GitLab so you could have an idea of the quality of my code and work, but unfortunately it's against Glassdoor's community guidelines.
You should probably think twice before investing your time and effort on this company. They were very unconsidered. They certainly do not appreciate the amount of work and time I put into it.
