CrunchTime was a considerable waste of MyTime.
I spent a month meeting with various folks. Had some great conversations and it seemed like a good fit.
Then I had a brief and odd interview with their technical guy in Eastern Europe.
His English was poor but more importantly he did not seem able to listen to my answers and constantly interrupted and over-rode me, sometimes 5 or 6 times in a row. Mostly it seemed like a culture clash with 50% of the blame for that being on me. However, working with an overseas team who have a different culture is not attractive to me at all.
Crunchtime are looking to beef up their US operations with several hires. I have to wonder if this person felt threatened by that.
More generally I got the impression of a company whose technology reflected their core business. Unfortunately not in a good way at all, as software development does NOT reflect back-of-house operations at a restaurant. Instead of quality software development practices up front, I heard about a reactionary approach. They addresses quality by jumping right on bugs... when reported by customers.
Clear deadlines and bugs found by customers with clear lines of responsibility seemed to be the major drivers of the development process. Parties are in Eastern Europe, US and India. This is seen as working well as the emphasis is on clear lines of responsibility and not on collaborating which requires extensive same time zone work together. They address customer issues by passing tickets from one team to another based on timezones in Eastern Europe, US and India. I don't know about you, but for me, in every software engineering position I've had, the notion of 'passing on my work at the end of my shift' for someone else to continue in their shift is NOT the way I want to work. I also think this will lead to huge problems for them. Software development, unlike restaurant operations, is not shift work and treating it as such will generally led to poor outcomes in the future. I prefer to pair and mob to avoid that. You can't pair and mob well with overseas folks 7-8+ hours apart however as I have learned through several engagements.
I got the sense that command and control and meeting deadlines was the very clear management style. The hiring manager interviewing me seemed to know very little about Agile and Agile Testing and seemed unaware of the software quality development processes that have grown over the past 10 years. He was really nice but also seemed more of an old style QA guy than a modern quality engineer who is passionate about agile development. I am and was not a good fit.