About a year ago I was really interested in Health Catalyst, even to the point that I was hoping for an offer. I would most likely have accepted it. I thought that I would be a great fit for the company. I already had multiple years of experience in the healthcare industry, all of the requirements and many of the desirable requirements on the job posting, and I even was coming in as a direct referral. A current employee of Health Catalyst spoke very well of the company and submit me personally to their hiring department. I was set up to take the take-home development assignment. I worked on it for probably 6-8 hours at home after working from my current job and believed that the project worked correctly and looked good. After I passed it along to the development manager, I was told that the company wasn't interested in me. I asked for more details because I tried to follow their vague instructions as well as I could have. After pushing for a little more feedback about why I wasn't up to par, I was told that I needed to use a technology, AngularJS, that wasn't even specified at all for the job requirements or from the poorly described task assignment. This was obviously a very bad experience for me. I spent a good amount of time working on the project to only be turned down because I didn't use a specific technology. Even though my project worked correctly and did what was specified, I wasn't even offered the chance to come in to speak with the team. I don't know if it would have worked out with the company otherwise, but if I was willing to spend that amount of time to impress the company, the least they could do would be to bring me in to talk to them.

They have a very standardized interview process. Phone call w HR, take-home tech skills assessment, panel interview. I did fine on the initial two phases, and comparing my code to other solutions up on GitHub, it was not hard to advance to the panel round. This is where the experience wasn't so good - the initial interviewer had technical difficulties and was at least 5 minutes late. Throughout that first hour, he mentioned time being short several times, and saved a tech coding question for the last 20 minutes. As I start to define some entity classes, he stops me and says not to, just focus on the algorithm because there isn't enough time. This essentially strips away a frame of reference for myself to use when implementing the algorithm - it wasn't a difficult problem, but the frequent reminders about time running out are not really conducive to do my best problem solving. It was unprofessional and threw me off, so much so that I mentioned it to the next two interviewers in the second hour. If you are trying to assess how a SE tries to solve a problem or implement an algorithm, let them work it out!