Their engineers do not seem to be the brightest lightbulbs. The engineer interviewing me had difficulties comprehending that with a Master's degree in Computer Science and 6+ years of experience, I can be skilled in more than one area of software development. The engineer expected all my answers regarding professional experience to be revolve around Elixir, which is a rare programming language. Despite having experience with developing backends from scratch in Elixir and dedicating part of my Master's degree to studying functional programming paradigms, the engineer did not like that my most notable career achievement is connected to mobile app development. From the way the engineer talked about their engineering team, it looks like they hired too many unqualified people and now they are a bit stuck with at least half of their 250 engineers fighting with Elixir (at least that is what the engineer interviewing me said).

In my first couple of interviews, I was told that after the coding challenge, there would be a follow-up interview where I had the opportunity to discuss my solution with the engineering team. I was obviously very disappointed then, that after spending in excess of 15 hours on the coding challenge, I was not even given the opportunity to discuss my solution with the engineering team at all, and was instead given some feedback that I didn't agree with. I found some of their feedback to be unfairly pedantic, asking for things that would have added a lot more time to the already long coding challenge, such as typos in the documentation (something I specifically called out in my write-up as having not had enough time to do). Some of the other feedback notes given were valid concerns, but they were things that I could have easily defended my decision-making for in a conversation with the engineers. Specifically, there was feedback that "[My solution] was slowed by synchronous waits [...] counteracting the benefits of parallel email sending.". This is a valid concern, but the problem statement was unclear about the expected return of the endpoint. I had to decide whether the code should wait and return a completed result or just return an incomplete result immediately. I went for what I thought was a more straightforward option after performance testing my solution and finding it to be an adequate response time, but the team was not happy with my choice. The challenge also asked for "production ready" code, but production code should not be created by individuals without input from other team members. I would have thought there would be more value in discussing my solution and my approach rather than just taking it at face value. Overall, I feel somewhat disrespected having given so much of my free time to this activity only to be given feedback that I disagree with and not being given an opportunity to discuss the nuances of the problem with the team.