Horrid experience surrounding the coding challenge.
They insisted on doing their own task and refused to consider my personal apps that were nearly identical. It was a basic app where we'd get user's location and then fetch list of nearby venues. Even thought it was simple, it was still an entire app on which I've spent about 30 hours of my life. I've created interface, communication class (let's call it that) with protocols that can be reused, proper structure with support for unit-testing and various unit-tests in question. I was automatically rejected by the System. In retrospect, they clearly never planned on hiring me, but forced to do this task anyway.
Interviewer lied saying that it was accidental, because “he thought that I won’t be interested in position, because I didn't seem excited to do a coding challenge”. So he marked something in the system and it mistakenly sent me the rejection. So I received another rejection exactly a week later.
After contacting them for explanation, they gave a list of bogus reasons. Like for example, there is a bang operator that may cause crash (even though it is a single ! in the entire app and it used on variable that is guaranteed to be initialised at that stage). Or for example, the comment “Left weird unused code in the project”. They even said that there were warnings in the code, when I didn’t have a single one.
There was also this certain hubris emanating from all the interviewers. They have a successful product, but they always sound overly proud of themselves. Other companies can also be proud and even boastful about their product, but they don’t act like they created the next Google.
As a side note, when we receive the JSON with a list of venues, it looks extremely messy with multiple repeated variables and incoherent structure, which to me indicates poor planning.
1st interview was with HR, which was just general info. 2nd was with Team Lead, where we talked about motivation and they threw in a few technical questions.
Overall, I highly regret spending my time on this company and I should have refused outright doing their test. It was a truly rotten experience that chewed on a piece of my soul.