Step 1: Phone Screen w/recruiting Step 2: Screen with hiring manager to discuss technical background, projects. There were some general questions about Ruby on Rails and React, but no "gotchas" Step 3: Panel Interview with software engineers from a few different teams. All cultural and behavioral questions. Step 4: Technical Interview -- basically going through a ticket on their product (from a few years ago). The actual problem wasn't difficult, but navigating an unfamiliar code base was hard. The engineers I worked with were very friendly and were eager to help unblock you, but they even admitted they weren't familiar with that portion of their code base. So that was a bit frustrating. The ticket comprised of utilizing your knowledge of RoR and React. I didn't have the time to get to the React portion of the ticket. Step 5: Get ghosted by the recruiter. Even though the hiring manger said I'd hear back either way. Overall, every engineer I interviewed with was friendly, helpful, and transparent about working for Home Chef. They all seemed like great people to work with. Getting ghosted by the recruiting team was frustrating. If I didn't get the job, just tell me! Especially after devoting the better part of 5 hours interviewing with you.

The whole process started out great. They did the cultural stuff before the technical which I am always a big fan of and I got to chat at great length with a number of really smart folks that seemed to have their heads on straight. After that, things went south quick. The recruiter seemed to go on vacation every two days so the cadence of communication was beyond painful. Once we finally got the technical portion scheduled I was a bit surprised to find it being led exclusively by two very junior team members. They presented me with an old ticket from one of their internal tool repos and I immediately had questions regarding the terminology being used within the ticket as I had no familiarity with the tool. The junior cadets weren't able to answer any of these questions as they had never worked on the repo in question, either. This would become a running theme over the next two hours as they truly had no idea what was going on. It's likely that I could have figured it all out for myself if the screen sharing app they had chosen to use --Tuple--was actually capable of implementing screen sharing in any usable fashion. Since it isn't, I mostly sat there staring at a tiny, blurry, rainbow macroblocked disaster which I could not read at all. Try to scroll something and you sit there and wait 30 seconds for Tuple to catch up. By the time it does, it's scrolled way past wherever you wanted to go and you have no idea where you are anymore. At least a dozen times it actually moved and/or closed the window entirely and I had no idea what was going on. I tried to supplement my woefully incomplete understanding of the code in front of me by asking questions but the two juniors just sat there like deer in headlights, reminding me that they didn't know anything about this code either. It was the most utterly ridiculous experience you could possibly imagine and I sincerely regret not simply ending it after the first hour of zero progress. As soon as I saw that they were using Material Design everywhere I completely lost interest and was just trying to be polite and hoping that Tuple's performance might magically improve.