J'ai postulé via un recruteur. J'ai passé un entretien chez BeReal. (Paris) en nov. 2025
Entretien
A recruiter reached out to me to interview with the company. The recruiter screening was really friendly yet professional and a great experience overall.
The next stage was a take-home technical assessment. The assessment asked to clone the instagram stories feature, from scratch with infinite scrolling of stories, with a polished UI/UX and attention to detail, which was also reinforced verbally by the recruiter. They also wanted a short simulator screen capture showcasing the app as well as a video of me explaining the technical and architectural choices made. The problem however was that they wanted all of this in 4 hours, which is completely ridiculous since the videos alone would take about half an hour.
Needless to say I did not even bother to start the task.
The red flags:
The take-home had an insanely short deadline while asking for a complex polished feature.
The short timeframe indicates a completely toxic runaway pace engineering culture.
The requirements of the take-home might also indicate they are outsourcing actual work to their candidates.
Interviewing a senior engineer with such a UI heavy task is not appropriate as it leaves out more important aspects such as architecture, navigation and technical details. This can be an indicator of an engineering culture that prioritises fast and visible results instead of quality.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Standard ‘tell me about yourself’ script all recruiters basically ask.
J'ai postulé via un recruteur. J'ai passé un entretien chez BeReal. en oct. 2025
Entretien
After a short call with the recruiter, I was told to choose a day/time when to receive the take-home task.
The take-home task was timed and limited to 4 hours. You state when you want to receive it and are required to email them the solution within that time.
Don't know the full process since I got rejected on the take-home task. See below.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
The task was to copy the Stories feature from Instagram. Though the spec called it "Stories-like feature similar to Instagram", based on the feedback I received it seems they expected a clone of the app in 4 hours.
The spec is quite simple on paper (stories list; tapping on it shows the story content; marking the story as seen; ability to like a story; persistence across relaunches; dynamically loading more stories). However it mentions that they "place great emphasis on both product execution and user experience". So basically they expect a pixel-perfect clone of the Stories feature, complete with exactly the same UX, even though most of these expectations are not specified.
