Wow, what a train wreck. Applied for a Senior UX Engineer role, the JD leaned very heavily toward front-end (only one line mentioned full-stack/backend). Had a recruiter call scheduled, the recruiter missed it without giving me any notice, but I didn't have an email address for her so I reached out on linkedin to reschedule. Call went fine, she was odd, but she got me in touch with an engineer for a first interview round. Discussed my background with the engineer, who I really really liked, he was a great interviewer and it felt more like a conversation than a one-sided boomer style interview. It went really well and he sent me (directly) a take home coding challenge, and said the recruiter would be in touch to schedule a time to review it.
It was a straightforward *all front-end* coding challenge to build a three step wizard, with an emphasis on having good UX patterns. I did it, let the recruiter know. Heard nothing back. I emailed her three times to follow up. Ended up emailing the engineer directly, and we scheduled a review with him and a team manager.
This interview went great, my technical challenge accounted for all the edge cases they brought up, I felt really good about it. I followed up with the engineer (since the recruiter was MIA), and almost immediately got a calendar invite from a different manager (we'll call him Manager A for clarity) there. I would have two more rounds of interviews, one with a designer and one with two more managers.
Designer interview went extremely well. He was very excited to have someone focused on UX and Front-End join. We really clicked. Toward the very end of the call, Manager A joined and heard us talking about it, and stopped us to interject that apparently they "don't hire front-end engineers" and that this job, (even though it was listed as front-end focused, and even though every interview up until this point had been front-end focused) was actually a 50/50 FE/BE full-stack role. I roll with the punches but in my following interview with Manager A and Manager B I remain honest that while I have worked full-stack in the past, my career is more front-end focused.
This interview with him and the other manager goes ok on my end, not amazing but not bad, (though I felt like the two of them raised a lot of red flags about the company for me) and I get a message back saying that they wouldn't want me on Manager B's team anymore (I think he didn't like me but everyone else at the company did) but think I would be a good fit for the company and want to make me an offer but have some new things to work through first. One is that even though I applied for "Senior UX Engineer" they wanted to remove the senior from my title due to my lack of BE experience and change it to just "Full-Stack Engineer" (not "Senior UX Engineer" like the listing said). In addition, even though that was supposed to be the final interview, they want one more (6th if including recruiter call) interview with a team lead from their client that I'd be working with.
The final interview is a bit awkward, as they seemed to really push with this guy that I would 50/50 Full-Stack and he seemed to expect that my background would reflect that. In addition he exposed that they have some pretty poor practices around QA, testing, and sort of suggested low morale.
After hours of interviews and a long take home challenge, I get a quick, generic form email from a no-reply address saying they are not interested in moving forward.
Overall it seems like there was a *huge* disconnect between what was being hired for and what Manager A wanted. Not sure how they can be that disorganized but I imagine if a recruiter had been a part of the conversation that could have been caught before I dropped about 10 hours into interviewing and programming for this.
