Where to begin...
I Interviewed for a senior front end leadership position specializing in React. The interview process was one of the lengthiest I've been a part of. It consisted of no less than 6 steps and multiple interviews.
This gave me PLENTY of opportunities to ask questions, which I did to include exactly what they were hoping to get from me when hired. Answers included leading the front end technology stack, bringing a fresh perspective to help solve their current issues in their current UI stack. My entire interview, code and questions were all focused on the front end, react, JS, and css.
Interview process below..
Step 1 - Record yourself answering some questions on video
Step 2 - Phone interview all questions were focused on react/frontend experience
Step 3 - 5 hour day of interviews between different individuals
Step 4 - Additional hour of interviews on a separate day
Step 5 - Told they were on a hiring freeze...
Step 6 - 6 months later contacted me, they still want me, another meeting..
Step 7 - hired.
Once hired the person I primarily dealt with during the interview process was fired after two weeks.. that really didn't set me up with a good feeling for the position. I think that's why everything below took place unfortunately.
The main issue was the work entailed almost no front end work at all, for the first 3 weeks I didn't touch any code. I found out the lack of UI work was brought up by other developers prior to me being there, and continued my entire time during. I quickly understood why many of the other front end devs have resigned themselves to doing automated testing, QA, and python.. due to the lack of actual front end work.
PHP is considered front end there. A month or so after starting I was tasked with full feature work in (legacy) PHP, never did I think a promised front end leadership position would include fulltime active new feature PHP development.
The general attitude is that no one in the software development world has an application as old as they do, hence that's why it's architected so poorly and "difficult to change". jQuery is still a first class citizen for example, with no initiative to move away from it, it's still being actively updated and used in new features.
Keep in mind there is an incredible amount of work that needs to be done however leadership has no interest, it's more about chasing revenue for specific clients than making overall changes. Something that was sold as a "bonus" is most of our customers are incredibly tech savvy so they're used to poor looking user interfaces.
My first few weeks I saw the designers get shot down and have to adjust their vision accordingly, it was a bit depressing as they seemed used to it, however frustrating since their initial visions and proposals were huge jumps forward.
Work and technology aside other red flags were quickly noticed.. they have no leadership on the UI, and a back seat driver for the other code base.
They have some incredibly talented devs who are in real need of leadership and guidance. They call it "democratically run" basically this means one person can be the squeaky wheel and shut down anything because people are too worried about upsetting an individual.
The other downside is when a developer consistently shows great initiative other devs talk behind their back out of jealousy and throw up road blocks as to not have their work used. It was pretty disheartening seeing this as I had to be a strong advocate for one developer just to get their ideas accepted into the codebase. Management also complains behind developers backs in how they can't control them and they run wild yet due to no leadership no one can or will step in to address these concerns.
From the interviews I was incredibly excited however I have never been at a place that took the wind out of my sails so fast. Most of these issues would be surmountable if there was any desire to actually change or have a plan to begin implementing change.
In the end I didn't love the product and my skills would greatly suffer for future marketability.
