First interview with the recruiter: straightforward and pleasant. All good.
Second stage technical test: very strange. You're given a week. It will take a week.
You're given a task to complete on their platform, so unless you're already familiar with it you'll need to learn it first. And the documentation is 'patchy' at best. And the platform is clearly several versions ahead of the documentation anyway, so the combination can seriously mislead. And the platform cannot do some really basic stuff, so you are forced to jump through hoops which are themselves documented just badly enough to send you in the wrong direction for hours.
Was this just poor technical knowledge on my part? Sure - I could accept that. Except that I've worked with the software of several competitors for years, so I'm not exactly a newbie. Based on my experience, Tray.ai has a lot of potential and plenty of great features though at the moment feels a bit hacky. But this is the platform on which they are evaluating you.
After spending a full 7 days on this task, I was left wondering why they did the technical test before an interview with the hiring manager. I guess that doing it this way around takes less of their time and more of mine? It certainly felt like a lack of respect.