This company is basically a contracting company. They take a share of the cut for interviewing candidates and finding talent, and then placing the qualified workers with partner employers they have relations with (and sometimes ones they barely know, in my experience). What doesn't make sense is that the finder fee is not a one time fee, but 30% of the check that employer pays towards the employee. Like why would it be such exorbitant rate? I get that there is a one time finder's fee, but a longer term contract for four months and they pocket 30% could quickly add up, making the candidacy of a very expensive hire not appealing. It would be 1/3 of a engineer's salary that they pocket which doesn't make economical sense to the contractor or the contractee, And it doesn't hold up considering the little value they provided to both parties. With the context of their above business model, the coding interview process makes it harder to understand. They made me create a card game from scratch for my interview take-home assignment. They provided the boilerplate code that seem to have not really been maintained for years. When the CICD ran, a test that broke it was one which references the "learn react" element. For context, I was interviewing for FE React engineer job. For any experienced engineer out there, the first thing one would do is remove that test from the CI CD pipeline, because it's an example for starting out a react project when pull in the react test library to their local development environment. It should not be kept as a test for the developer's own application. Either they were lazy to remove the example test, or they just didn't care. Just goes to show the minimum amount of effort to create the interviewing process. Finally, I have to mention, when I reached out to follow up on the next steps, they said they messed up and that their client contractor did not trust their interviewing process! This was after 3 rounds of interviews already and 4 hours spent completing their take home. LOL, they said I would be referred to their client directly to be re-interviewed again if I wanted. Then they said they could reach out to their client, With the condition (AGAIN!) if I accept to raise the threshold my contract payment by 30% so they can get paid! Their reasoning is that they wasted their own time and they got nothing out of it. "Hello?", you don't know how to read your audience? Where is your basic business acumen. 1) You wasted your own time as result of your own disorganization. It's not my problem. Don't interview candidates for that client when they don't accept third party qualifying placement process. How did you build that client relation anyways? I have so many questions. 2) What about the time I wasted to do your take home assignment. 4-8 hours. They promised that the 4-8 hours is paid, BUT it's with condition attached, that ONLY when the candidate is hired and placed successfully. This a classic get-them-hooked-first scheme. For any person who has somewhat basic understanding of questionable business practices, this is just a strategy to get the candidate to apply to a company that appears to be trustworthy and friendly, then later retain plausible deniability of the original offer. Too bad for the loser candidate who is desperate for work. Overall my impression is that this company is scamming good engineers and they prey on desperation and are not apologetic for it. They are in the business of taking the biggest cut from contractors, and the current employer market situation. They do the least amount of work they can get away with to find good candidates, in the process of which, they do not care about their long term reputation of screwing over their candidates or their clients. DO NOT INTERVIEW WITH THEM!

I applied in response to an ad in the Django News email newsletter. The first step was to submit personal information and a letter describing my related technical background current interests. The page did not collect my resume, but did have adtech that prevented it from being submitted from a browser running common ad block extension. After using another browser to submit, I received an automated email that included the following: Application Process 1. Review application and resume First we determine if we are a good fit, for example if our tech stacks and interests match. 2. Next step: Take a quick code assessment This step is new to our process and is meant to be a quick assessment before either party invests any more time. Depending on the skills and position you applied for, you may see questions covering: TypeScript, React, CSS, HTML, Python, Django. We'll be adding Node.js shortly.“ The company skipped step one because they never got my resume and the assessment link arrived instantly. This “quick” code assessment turned out to be the following: “Please take the assessment in one go. It should take 45-60 minutes to complete, depending on the role. If you're applying for full stack, it may take longer.” This was a big ask given I had spoken with no one at the company, but I mistakenly gave them the benefit of the doubt. The test was a mix of multiple choice and short answer code entry questions. The code “editor” was not competitive with other code test or live coding sites. For example, tab added two spaces, but their example code used four. Okay I’ll hit tab doubly as much, I suppose. This small mistake on their part sort of symbolized the sloppy work of Uplift in building this assessment application, and general lack of attention to detail. What followed was a trip down someone’s leetcode lane: Many questions required unpacking nested typing annotations with code written purposefully to confuse. A key aspect of this “assessment” was being able to know the exact syntax of relatively obscure Python in webdev. For example, the proper use of partial(), which I’ve yet to come across in six years of building with Django. Another key aspect of this exam is that it instructs you not to use any references while taking it. If you let the tab lose focus a warning will show implying you are cheating. However, there are no code hints and you are not given a way to test the compilation of your code. It remained unclear if code syntax was important or factored into how submissions would be “graded.” About 3/4 through my work, the page showed an error saying that it could not be submitted due to some number of focus seconds. Though, I had not attempting to submit the page. Fearing I would lose all of my work on something I already knew I did not want, I went to inspect and found the console littered in errors, and another warning about “losing focus” for this transgression. One of the final questions was to write a Django model for an Employee class. “Finally, something that makes sense to test,” I thought. But the question was relatively trivial and vague on requirements. I don’t know who writes model definitions syntactically perfect entirely from memory, but that was the request. I submitted my assessment and got a response within an hour saying: “Thanks for reaching out about our open position here at Uplift. We appreciate that you took the time to apply and complete the assessment. Unfortunately, based on your results, we have decided not to move forward. … We had a lot of very good candidates applying and we have been moving forward with other candidates where we saw a closer match. “ The rest of the text repeated a phrase thanking me for my time repeatedly, and the email had different font styles to indicate the slapdash assembly of their assessment rejection workflow. I regret not coming to Glassdoor first to read about how badly it also would have been to interview with employees if this firm. If I had known that, I would have avoided wasting time and giving my personal data to this group. I’d warn anyone away from applying to this company or any that would screen professionals this way