Their final technical interview is one of the worst interviewing experiences I had the misfortune to take part in during my 10+ years of Software Engineering career. I took part in many interviews before, and I did run many myself. And this one was not on a level that I would not expect from a company with such a big profile like Canva. There were so many problems with it, that I'm even surprised at myself that I didn't just cancel it after the first 5 minutes. To list only some of them:
- NO information was given that this interview will be technical. Before any previous technical interviews information was given on what to prepare, but not this time.
- All of the requests for special needs were ignored. Do you have dyslexia? Do you suffer from panic attacks? you stutter? Have a poor eye-sign? It doesn't matter.
- Interview requires you to share your screen and to use an IDE of your choosing. Overall this would be a good thing, except that because of lack of information about this request before the interview means you might end up scrambling an IDE in the first 5 minutes.
- The IDE that you are supposed to have set up before the interview is not any IDE. It needs to be specifically set up for JavaScript. Except the task starts with TypeScript. Except you are now supposed to import a library with html tags. Except now it needs to have buttons in a browser and run in a webpage.
- Mismatch between different concepts and languages (Typescript, Javascript, run it as a script, import using html tag, run it in a browser as it now needs buttons etc) makes impression that the person running the interview is just not very experienced neither in coding nor in running interviews.
- Any form of higher level discussion is noted as a negative. You explained why the JS class system is a mess and you would instead use a builder pattern? 'Candidate doesn't understand JS objects'. You mention how 'this' keyword is a mess in JS and the problems on relying on it, and how you use a pattern to work around it? 'Candidate doesn't understand this keyword' etc.
- 45 min is a very short time frame to try to judge someone's technical skills. I admire the skill required to judge someone fairly in such a short timeframe.
- Speculation: technical tasks possibly never internally tested. All of the bizarre setup mistakes would be easily spotted by just running it against someone in the company.
