Applied through external recruiter. Standard first round, slightly technical/behavioral interview with hiring manager. Tell me about yourself, what do you know about Artium. Questions were focused on test driven development, following best practices and pair programming. Next two rounds were 3 hour blocks of pair programming. Was not given a choice of language, and was told that it would be fine if I had not used it before, “it’s about the process”. I was lured into agreeing with a $300 gift card by the initial recruiter for my time, so I was pretty excited for the interview as it seemed like they cared about candidates time. I was told the languages would be Java and Ruby on Rails. The first interview was the “Java” round. It was a Kotlin based application with a react front end. I was given control as the “driver” and was expected to add the missing functionality, using whatever I would like to use. This involved a foreign IDE, a completely new language I needed to research, as well as writing the tests first because of the focus on TDD. After 3 hours of learning code on the spot, I had code that seemed to run but the tests were failing. My interviewer had no idea why, and said he would definitely make sure he knew the code enough next time he interviewed someone else. Cool. Later the same day, I receive an email they wouldn’t be moving forward with the second round which was the next day. I had to finish the second round of interviews before I could receive the gift card. Left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth - reading the reviews on here match up with my experience. They obviously are trying very hard to improve the interview experience by offering money for your time, but only if you make it past the first 3 hours of time they waste. I took two days off of work for them and made sure I had nothing to planned to fit them in and they burned me. Red flags all over the place.

The interview process was quite long. Tech screen, multiple pair programming sessions and then additional meetings which were not originally mentioned. I understand the importance of selecting the right candidate, but more transparency around steps would be helpful for candidates in the future. The strange part was I entered the offer phase. I provided an initial salary range, then was ghosted. Maybe it's growing pains in a small company, but after 10+ hours of interviews this is not acceptable. I really enjoyed my interview with one developer in particular but I couldn't recommend this experience.