I had 2 calls, the first by the HR person and that was very nice. The representative described the culture of the company and I got very excited. Then I got a second interview. I talked with the hiring Manager. He seemed very cold and did not seem to show the culture of the company. I was concerned with him but still was excited with the job.

I work in a leadership position now in tech and I often use this interview experience as one of the examples of the rudest and most demoralizing interview experiences I've had in tech. When I was talking to someone they actually we're like "Why dont you leave a review?" And I thought... thats actually a great idea because experiences like the one I had can leave people feeling not great about their own abilities. And I hope if someone felt the same in the process that they come across this and don't give up hope in the job search. I've been denied many times and never had a bad experience or ever felt like I should leave a negative review. I usually leave them feeling good with solid constructive criticism. (I'm the type of person that won't even return food if the orders wrong, so leaving a bad review feels way out of character for me). My first interviews went okay. It could have went either way. These were followed by a sample code project to create an API Heres what it included copy and pasted from the document: - Create & Update a user - Create, read, update, delete & list topics - Create, update, delete replies - View all replies for a topic - Users can watch or unwatch topics - When a user creates or replies to a topic, they should be added as a watcher - When a topic is deleted, all related data should also be deleted - When a reply is created all watchers of the topic should receive an email - No need to use an actual email service, you can add a log message that simulates the send - Don’t worry about security, keep it simple and focus on the above tasks Expectations: ● Well formatted responses ● DRY code ● Well architected code (SOLID principles) ● Unit Tested ● Written in PHP (framework is up to you) ● Document out all steps to setup the application ● We hope this project will take you somewhere between 3-5 hours Fast forward to the interview.... I chose to use the laravel framework (this is what was in the job description when applyting). The person who was assigned to review the code started with a phrase something like "Sorry you chose laravel, but I don't like the framework, so I'm gonna be biased". The interviewer then spent 20-30 minutes going over why he thinks the laravel framework is bad. And then he loaded up vscode and was going through their codebase to show me how other developers had written "bad laravel code." He pointed out how he could have completed this project in 1-2 hour easy without the use of any framework. And added in an extra rant about how I used integration tests instead of unit tests and how integration tests are bad and I should have use unit tests. Along with other highly opinionated ideas, I barely spoke through this whole thing lol. At this point I was uncomfortable and really just saw this interview going nowhere. I wanted to jump off, but stayed, remaining calm and did not get upset. I wouldn't have taken the job even if they offered me double the salary. I suspect a highly toxic engineering culture. And even though I tried to shrug it off, this still did affect my morale in the job search. Fast forward to today, I am now a staff engineer (and one of the youngest) in a top tech company. And I strongly attribute my current success to the amazing mentors with great technical ability and uplifting/encouraging leadership I had around me. With that said, I do not believe this is the place that will foster growth for someone looking to excel in their tech career. I would be very cautious for people new to the industry interviewing here. And do not get discouraged in your job search!