FreshGrade interview questions

1. Phone call with the recruiter. 2. Fixing a piece of poorly implemented JavaScript code. 3. In person interview with their technical leadership at their Kelowna office. First two steps were routine, nothing special to write about. The third step was a nightmare. I was being interviewed by two of their guys, one of which was the lead of their engineering department. From the onset of the interview it became clear that these guys had no interest in getting to know me or my skill set - their only interest was showing me just how clever __they__ are. Standing at the whiteboard, drawing diagrams and preaching completely irrelevant, mundane BS. These guy are not interested in building and launching a successful product that will serve their users' needs; these guys are interested in clever programming challenges to make themselves feel good, and are looking for like-minded drones that will not upset their status quo. They let it slip that they had rebuilt the entire product - from scratch - three times in the last ~7 years. Each time it was because someone "chose the wrong technology." I had my doubts about that statement, but kept my mouth shut. After the interview I pulled up some reviews of their product, and found hundreds upon hundreds of 1-star complaints about poor performance, poor UI/UX, downtime, and general uselessness of their product. Having sat through that "interview," it became very clear just *why* their product keeps failing, and it sure as heck has nothing to do with the tech stack. If you care about building useful products, don't waste your time with FreshGrade.

I applied through their Careers page, and received an email from an HR person. He sent me a practical technical assessment - I spent some hours on it and sent it back, and he passed it to their technical hiring team. In a follow up email, he mentioned that the dev team had found an aspect that could be improved, and asked how I'd address that. I was a bit blown away - I did not expect a second chance on the test! I did some more work on it and sent off a second submission, and was invited to an in-house tech interview. I spent an hour with two very personable developers who chatted with me about technical topics for a while, then gave me a laptop and had me work on some code, verbalizing my thoughts as I improved it. Overall I found the process very professional.