I was given a test assignment to complete at home. A week after I submitted it, I received feedback in the form of text files. Presumably, the evaluation was conducted by a LLM (bulletin list organized by category, these tiny emojis here and there); I disagree with most of the points, but my request for an additional call — where I could defend my decisions and approaches — was denied. I spent five days on this assignment, and the company refused to give me 15 minutes. This shows a complete lack of respect for someone else’s work.
I applied online. I interviewed at Neugelb Studios in May 2025
Interview
Applied online, after the initial recruiter got to know call, I was given a take-home assignment. I spent more than 4 days properly building a scalable, maintainable, and testable app architecture. Of course, it may not be perfect; every solution has some pros and cons, and usually there is no best solution. Then I just received basic rejection mail. Rejections are fine; however, if you are asking candidates to complete this long take-home test, then you should show some respect to the human effort and give proper feedback.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Neugelb Studios (Berlin) in Oct 2021
Interview
- First contact with HR person, standard questions and overview of the company / role.
- Development exercise with simple requirements for an app that fetches movies from an API, movie detail screen, infinite scrolling, optional auto-complete search.
- Feedback about the exercise (that never came, more on it below).
- More interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
After spending some time doing the exercise, I've sent them the repository with the working app that met the requirements and beyond, using latest Apple tech + best practices (SwiftUI + Combine).
The feedback never came. They said it would be done by the end of that week, never arrived. I had to ask for a feedback from the HR person. Then he said: oh yeah, you didn't pass. You could have used X and Y.
That was it. No detailed answer about why the chosen approach was "bad". No specifics about why the code wasn't accepted or didn't meet their expectations. Of course I could have used X or Y. And also W, Z, T, U. It's software development after all. EVERY approach has its pros and cons.
That tells me that the developers of the company can't argue reasonably about code/architecture, don't have deeper knowledge on modern iOS development and how SwiftUI / Combine works or they simply don't care.
Either way, I would keep distance from the pretentious lads -- if you want to save your precious time.
Hej, thank you for your honest feedback. We always want to ensure the best candidate experience and therefor we are very sorry that we could not give you that in your process.
All the best for your next career move and stay healthy! Your NEUGELB Talent Acquisition Team
