The position was tailored toward students still in college or about to graduate. I applied online, process took 3-4 weeks. Had a phone screen, virtual behavioral interview, and a 4 hour long in person interview and test. The phone and behavioral screen were pretty basic, but The 4 hour in person interview was a bit of a nightmare to say the least.
The first thing I noticed was the extreme nepotism in the selection process. Diversity is important, and if you have a majority of your candidates coming from one or two ethnic groups it's not diverse - Even if they themselves may be considered minorities. In this scenario, Indian / Southeast Asians , and Asian candidates were arriving by the van load. After we checked in, I could see why. The majority of the managers and existing developers were also representative of those racial demographics as well. One of the managers in particular went all the way to UGA to bring quite a few in, and that's mainly who he interacted with for the duration of the event. One girl was admitted as a "walk in" even though the rest of us had to go through multiple screenings just to get to that point. There were very few blacks, whites, latinx, native, or candidates of other groups represented among the actual candidate pool.
The test itself was pretty fair albeit a little long. It was 30+ pages of content spread out over various languages and concepts. The first part was about 5 functions that will have taken the entirety to figure out just by themselves. There is no way you can finish everything, but it was a good mental exercise, and gave me ideas on things to work on.
The actual in person interview was the worst. To reiterate, this was a college hire position. The person looked down on the bootcamp I went to, barely acknowledged the computer science degree I was working on, and scrutinized every bit of my professional experience. He literally kept trying to relate a tech support position back to a dev role as if I will have had the time or opportunity to work on software projects outside of my hired responsibility. He didn't ask questions on my ability to problem solve, but he scrunched his nose when he saw the company I worked for and asked what it was.
If this is a college hire role, then it makes sense to ask at least once what I'm doing there. For example he'd ask me if Id programmed or worked on xyz at my current job - like I hadn't already told him what the job entailed, and I kept having to redirect back to projects I'm working on in school and in my spare time for examples on how specific things may be set up, collaborations, and issues I may/may not have run into.
In the situational section he almost deliberately misunderstood everything I said, and repeatedly interrupted me during sentences and cut me off. For example, at one point he asked about a collaboration project and how I would respond if someone needed help. Would I just give them the answer, or point them to the right direction? I described in detail a situation I had where a fellow student in my bootcamp had issues understanding how to query results from a DB, I explained the basic concepts to this person and how it related to what we were doing, gave them online resources, and made myself available to help. This person didn't really want my help because it can be a bit unsettling admitting you need help in that type of setting, so when that didn't work I was able to connect them with the right instructor who had a good understanding of our project and issue. He seemed to be stuck on the fact this person needed instructor help and completely invalidated my role in the process. I had at least 3 other questions go the same way.
The last thing is when he basically asked if I do anything to keep learning and practicing. I told him about some of the books I read, blogs I follow, things I practice, and how I utilize places like udemy and youtube to keep learning. Once again, he acted like he didn't know what that was(udemy), how those skills could translate and asked outright how you'd be able to fully learn with something like that. He asked something along the lines of how you had any hands on practice or actual code be written with a service like that. When I explained that many of these teach a concept and charge the student to do an exercise or project, once again he looked unconvinced. Not once did he ask about github, or a portfolio or any of the actual projects I've built and actually listen to my responses.
All in all, I regret having invested so much time in this when I had other companies interested as well. No one has a month to waste trying to get hired at a company that never had any intention of truly considering them.
