Before you get the "big day" you go through the standard screening/hr which is normal.
The "big day" is a 3 hour commitment where the 1st half is a live coding session and the 2nd is a systems design architecture discussion.
Normally, I'm not a fan of live coding (you'll understand why) but I thought I'd give it a shot because the CTO was very amiable and I enjoyed the prospect of working at Volt Labs.
We get there and it's a Repl.it link. The object is that you have a skeleton app that looks like iMessenger on your iPhone and you have to include the functionality of a chat message app.
Right away I discovered that the React Dev Tools was dead. Like the styling was off and I essentially couldn't use it. Great. The interviewer commented "Huh? That's new to me. That's never happened before." Great. No powerful debugging tools.
Not to mind that I'm in a new environment and I haven't coded daily in 4 months (layoffs, right?) so a bit of the syntax was wonky. There was no prettier, there was no formatting. This was a brand new environment and I haven't coded daily in months so obviously I was shaky in the beginning dealing with some dumb formatting issues. Then the interview himself says he didn't work React too much so he wasn't sure but we got it.
Anyway, I didn't get implement the last part of the challenge but I thoroughly explained how to implement it. I wasted too much on getting the dev env setup and dealing with formatting issues that the Repl.it had issues with. Trust me, when you code on a new dev env, it is ... different.
So, then the interviewer says we're going to take a break and be back in 20 minutes for the 2nd half. I come back and I wait... and wait... and wait. After about 20 more minutes of waiting in an empty chat, I find out our interviewer had left the Google Meet prior without saying anything.
I check my email and I see the generic rejection "Hey, we feel it's better go a separate way." email. I couldn't believe it. They literally left me mid-meeting.
To say I was surprised is an understatement. Rude, unprofessional, whatever you'd like to say. I never enjoyed live coding for the reasons illustrated above but if you're going to base a developer's skills because of a few syntactic issues on a new environment then leaving them mid-meeting, I just don't know.
One of the worst interviews I've had and left me completely baffled at how they dropped the ball.
