The process began with an application online.
About a day or so later I received an e-mail to schedule an in-person interview.
The first in-person interview consisted of an assortment of questions regarding my prior experiences, how I approached problems, and my thoughts on different development styles.
Present was sales/biz dev employee, two members of the engineer department, and the company President who periodically left the interview in progress.
The interview went a bit long. None of the employees there had reviewed my resume prior to the interview. The executive only asked one question regarding whether I had been referred to them by a recruiter or not and only seemed interested in avoiding paying the recruiter fee.
This interview was on a Friday. I heard back the next day (Saturday) requesting a second interview on Monday.
The second interview was quite a bit more structured. The interview consisted of two groups of two employees from different teams asking me both technical and non-technical questions. Again, none of the interviewers had reviewed my resume prior to the interview although each had queried me on my knowledge of the company. Each employee seemed very excited about the company and the mission.
I then met with the CEO and later the President.
The CEO had an aggressive attitude which included a peppering of questions both quasi-technical and non-technical.
The conversation with the President was slightly more comfortable. Her feedback was positive, however she expressed an interest in offering a substantially lower salary. This was particularly disturbing because I had not yet received *any* offer, so it felt as if she was negotiating in bad faith. One of the points she made was that my lack of college degree made me worth less. This ignored the fact that one of the co-founders and former CTO had also dropped out of college.
After the second interview, the company went silent for over a month. When I e-mailed them for feedback regarding their decision, they implied that they still had not made a decision.
Overall, my impression of Phone2Action was negative.
Based on the types of technical questions I was asked (unit testing, code review/quality), I can infer that this company has two massive problems: The first being a mess of unreliable and buggy code, the second being a desire to churn out new features at the cost of reliability. I have seen this dilemma before, and the root of the problem is that development is too fast and the developers are breaking under the pressure of delivering new features. I was asked a particularly telling question by the de-facto head of Development (there is no CTO; they are hiring for one), "How do you guarantee exponential LOC [line of code] output?". This question is completely ignorant of the reality of software development, especially project management. It seems the project managers are trying to squeeze every last drop out of the developers and banking on the 'mission' as a reason to stay.
I spoke with several of their developers outside of the interview process and they confirmed that the hours were incredibly long. Additionally, the pay is actually below market for a funded startup because there is no equity option. The President of the company tried to infer that their 'fringe' benefits were an equal replacement for lowering the salary by $45,000.