The process started out great, with a phone screen with one of the nicest recruiters I've ever met. She set up a pre-screening challenge as well, (tic-tac-toe game with your own flair)
After they checked and passed that I had a Skype interview with one of the founders and a senior designer.
Following this (2 weeks into the process) I was invited to the office for a full day of 6 interviews.
1. A second interview with the senior designer, (amazing person as well).
2. Interview with a Senior front end engineer, with technical challenges
3. Interview with Lead Cloud engineer, with more technical challenges
4. Interview with CTO
5. Interview with CEO
6. Second interview with Technical Recruiter.
All the interviews except the technical ones were great, amazing people and great process. However I unfortunately have to say they technical challenges were very offputting...
There were 2 easy standard algorithm whiteboard/some weird online editor challenges. where I wasn't allowed to use my normal coding environment which did bite me, as the online code editor had no visual indication of what kind of data I was dealing with, so it took me an extra minute to find a mistake beacuse the code editor's console showed pure JSON, while it was actually a string. It also didn't handle ES6 well, import statements didn't work but promises did, which caused me issues.
If you're like me and get nervous in interviews this is a big curveball to deal with. And I made mistakes I wouldn't have made when I usually code.
The real kicker with their interview process though, is their reliance on TRIVIA knowledge. You can easily get this job if you just read up on web trivia before the interview. This seems like the MAIN factor they rely on in the interview process.
There were quite a few of these, but I'll focus on 2 of them. The first one was they wanted in-detail explanation of hoistering. Which if you know what you're doing you know to (almost) NEVER use in production. Hoistering is terrible practice, and because I learned this from the getgo my trivia knowledge of this was limited.
The second trivia question was what exactly happens when you press enter after typing in a URL, (with and without https) + some TCP/UDP knowledge. Sure I learned about that like 5 years ago. But this is not something I as a web developer care to remember as it's information I have NEVER had any use for in my 9 years of programming. I grossly failed that test aside from mentioned Options and Get requests with doctypes and some basic headers.
A week later I got a call saying based on the 2 tech interviews they felt as if I needed a mentor. Which was honestly a little insulting. However they thought I was a great culture fit, and would try to fit me in somewhere next week.
Next time they called I wasn't given an offer, but I had a chance to ask into their process. They loved my initial coding challenge, and the decision not to hire me was solely based on my lack of "performance" during the 2 tech interviews. Since I did well on the algorithms aside from a little nervousness, the only technical issues I couldn't answer I was the trivia knowledge on the URL and bad practices I couldn't answer because I don't write bad-quality code.
I asked the Senior front end engineer and the Cloud lead, to give me a chance to prove what I could actually do, with whatever challenge they could throw at me, or even some different trivia questions, I obviously DON'T need a mentor and I know my stuff when it comes to actual coding. But was ignored.
So basically, the algorithm challenges were SUPER easy, if you're a good culture fit you can get a job at Airtame by just studying basic web-developer trivia questions the day before. I was extremely dissapointed by the weight they put on useless trivia knowledge, as opposed to actual code quality.
But it seems like a cool place to work even if they don't really understand how to do a proper tech interview.
