The interview process was positive.
The recruiter (internal) was friendly and seemed to be an advocate for me, after answered several questions regarding my background and interests.
The first step was a technical screening, which required knowledge of http requests, html, css, and javascript, but the screening was more of pair programming than an interview. This made the process smooth and shows the companies interest in a collaborative work environment. While the screening required technical skill, the task seemed to also be testing one's ability to play nicely.
Upon passing the screening, I was scheduled for an onsite interview. What I didn't realize is that this would be a three hour marathon of a series of interviews with three different groups. While that didn't bother me too much, I was not prepared for the length of the ordeal and was pretty mentally exhausted by the end.
It was the final interview that I bombed. I may still have struggled a bit at that point, but I would have done much better had I not been drained by that point in the day. Perhaps even having a cup of coffee at some point in the process would have helped.
Overall, the entire interview process revealed a company that was trying to do well by its developers and had a good culture.
However, I was concerned by one of the answers I received to my question "if you had a qualified friend who wanted to work here, would you recommend this company to them?" The response I received was interesting - the person kept muddling along about how every company is different and for some the culture is great and other's its not. I don't know about you, but if I worked at a great company, I'm looking for good devs I know to get a position there.
The problem came after the interview - silence. No response from nobody. I reached out via email, phone, linkedin, nothing.
Finally, after 6 weeks, one person on linked in was just checking up on me, he liked me but the team went another direction. Turns out the company went through a period of layoffs in between my interview and his message to me.
Finally, if you are self-taught or went through a bootcamp, many of the interview questions revolved around how the browser and javascript engine work when encountering various types of code. I felt very unprepared for these questions, even though I am confident in my ability to actually code. I was told my javascript skills were impressive (though my css was shaky, which it was). If you are a bootcamp or self-taught dev and you have been dependent on libraries and frameworks for css or JS, be sure to learn pure css and pure JS, it will help you tremendously in interview processes like these.
