Passed a technical assessment via Codility that indicated I passed the coding portion. Indian recruiter Cogo uses took two weeks to get back to me and requested I do a Karat interview. For those who don’t know, Karat interviews are a live technical assessment performed by a third party. So Cogo is asking me to do multiple assessments on my own time without ever speaking to anyone who actually works for the company. CTO added me on LinkedIn but never reached out, which is weird. I decided to take a hard pass on the karat interview. Bonus awfulness: Indian recruiter that Cogo uses called me multiple times but does not leave a voicemail indicating who he is or why he’s calling so I missed multiple calls from him. Furthermore he is super hard to understand which just adds more to the whole process feeling slimy.

The process began with an automated Codility coding challenge, which consisted of 2 questions. I was given 117 minutes to complete the challenge, or some amount of time which was way more than necessary. The first question was finding the max number of apples (along a row of trees) that can be picked by two people, without overlapping. The second question was finding the number of steps required to reduce a number (given as a binary string) to 0 if you divide by 2 when even and subtract by 1 when odd. Next came the phone screen, which was an idiotic "interview". My interviewer was some fresh grad, rather than the senior software lead that the email confirmation said it would be, and he seemed condescending and had a laundry list of inane CS trivia questions he wanted to ask. These questions were not only fairly easy to Google, but pretty pointless to ask because I doubt there are many new grads who have such a necessary breadth of knowledge off the top of their heads. There was absolutely no question to gauge my ability to code, which would seem to be the most important skill as opposed to my ability to cram esoteric CS knowledge. These questions seemed especially pointless to ask given that I don't even major in computer science. He also couldn't help but unnecessarily correct me every time I answered, which was annoying.