After an initial call with a member of the recruiting team, I got a link to a take-home coding exercise with detailed instructions. The exercise felt very relevant to the role I was applying for and I felt like I was given plenty of time to work on it. Once my solution was reviewed and graded by Slack's engineering team, the next step was a call with the hiring manager. They were able to share more details about the day to day work in the specific team I would be joining. Finally, I was invited for an onsite interview where I talked to four members of the engineering team. The onsite consisted of both technical and non-technical interviews.

The whole interview process was neither good or terrible. I expected a bit more from Slack as it's a fast growing company and from my chat with both the recruiter and a development manager, I can tell the company feels and act very much like what you expect from a start-up company. A few thing I quickly picked up were the development process seems pretty loose (not a bad thing necessarily but there will be growing pains once a company gets bigger), code first think later (screams Hello, technical debt!), and a very limited advancement in the technical side of a developer's career (seems like the only advancement for a senior developer is to go into management. Which to me does not interest me. I rather be an solution architect or become an uber level developer. Not everyone wants to manage projects.) As part of the pre-screening, everyone is given a technical exam to work on for a week. The exercise isn't hard but tedious and is supposed to be written without supporting libraries. I completed it and worked hard to show what my knowledge. Treated it professionally like writing an open-source project with all the test, show all the code and deployed it on the cloud. However, no one went to do a walkthrough with the submitted assessment work or even mentioned a thing about it. Very disappointed! Moreover, the communication towards the end of the process was quite slow. I have asked for a status update, since it has been a week since last phone interview with a dev manager. But they pretty much ignore my email until a rejection email days later. It is possible I expect too much from a start-up company since I have been with bigger corporations and HR and recruitment are much more experienced where I work or have worked. It just comes off as being very unprofessional. My advice if you are reading this, a simple email telling your applicants you are still looking into the application is enough to show the professionalism. Ignoring your other applicants because you are still negotiating with another applicant is not really a professional thing to do. It will eventually bite you.