Interview process started off with a friendly recruiter. Hopped on a call we immediately connected. He was extremely responsive as well. Now the bad: My first interview was administered via Google Meet and muro (to show my design process if need be). First, the interviewer was a regular software engineer who just wanted to get through the interview. As a candidate you get your feel for the company due to the first few impressions. I get it, the person has other responsibilities that occupy his mind but the interview is taking up time for both of us. Let's both put in our best.
The question was to design a Jira bulletin board. I was led to create a general design of a personal board. Then we focused on the design of a team board. We then narrowed in on the design on individual cards. He asked how would I layout title, subtitle, contributors, etc. I went on a brief tangent on how the DB schema would look but I quickly caught on that the interviewer was strictly focused on UI/UX. I created a good layout and explained my reasoning and everything was going great until I was asked on the debug process.
As a full stack engineer, there is so much that could go wrong. In particular, the interviewer asked how I would go about debugging empty cards. I asked follow up questions to see if this was a networking issue, server, or client concern. He was urging me to just throw out ideas. So I did. Incorrect access controls, networking certificate issues, opening dev tools to check errors, client/server TLS mismatch.
Once I exhausted my list of possible sources of issues he explains he expected me to open react dev tools and peep the virtual dom. I guess I over-engineered my debug process but to be fair, I did ask for further clarification and I wasn't given any. The engineer didn't even seem impressed in my thorough analysis. He was looking for that one particular response. In engineering (and I would know as I now work full time in corporate), there's a lot of merit in exhausting possible points of failure. As an engineer, further clarification is what narrows our scope.
In summary, I felt like the interview was treated as another task to just check off the engineers bucket list. From my research, I am in love with the company culture. Every company I've worked with has used on of their tools and I can attest to how great their products are. I look forward to the day I hop on another interview with them in where I am treated as a fellow engineer, rather than a checkbox.