All the steps before the last team fit interview were alright.
- Call with a recruiter
- Technical screening (hackerrank test containing some multiple choice questions and a leetcode medium type of task)
- 2-hour technical interview with 2 Android developers. They sent a list of topics to be prepared for, and we talked about almost all of them, so refreshing your memory on the topics they mention is worth it. That was one of the most difficult tech interviews of that type, not "level impossible" difficult, but quite challenging.
- Team fit interview if you pass all the previous stages. That's when things went south.
Since I heard some negative feedback regarding the company's culture, I had some doubts about working there from the very beginning, but still decided to give it a shot as I like the product itself.
Everything was fine before the team fit interview, all the communication was in English. But suddenly on the last step, they proposed to conduct the interview in Russian because "it will be faster for everybody". I don't usually speak Russian at work, but decided to let that slide. I don't think I would be slower in English, but if that's the case for them - well, who am I to judge?
The whole idea of going through literally all of my previous jobs in detail is pretty weird. They really wanted me to explain, what I did at every job I had and what impact on the project I made. Who cares what I did 5 companies ago as a junior developer? But maybe it's just me. Also, they asked me to tell them about some of the recent technical challenges I had and how I dealt with them, without even mentioning NDA. Because of NDA, I could not give them too many details. Of course, I've tried to talk about something not-so-critical, but I suspect they might be unimpressed by it.
One of the guys was alright overall, but I felt a bit of an arrogant vibe from another one. For example, when I just finished going through all of my previous jobs, he said something like "You've like always worked alone, how did you even end up becoming a senior?!" I mean, it's cool that atm they are working at a company that may afford 100 Android developers. But did they even listen to what I was talking about? I didn't have Android teammates at literally one job.
So, basically, I was ready for rejection after this last step, and now I'm quite sure I don't want to work in this company.