I had a very disappointing experience interviewing with Zoe. Before the live coding interview, they sent an email that included a small note about setting up the development environment in advance. Unfortunately, I missed that detail. As soon as the interview started and I realized the issue, I immediately apologized and asked within the first two minutes if we could reschedule so I could properly set everything up. In my experience, this is completely standard. Most companies either clearly emphasize environment setup requirements or explicitly state that if the setup is incomplete, the interview will be rescheduled. Instead, the interviewer responded that “every candidate needs to do that” and that it would not be fair to reschedule. Despite the awkward start, I worked quickly and had the environment 99% ready within about 20 minutes. At that point, the interviewer ended the session, saying we needed to stop. Throughout the interaction, I felt there was little flexibility given the situation. If the goal is to assess programming ability, the focus should be on problem-solving skills, not penalizing candidates over environment setup technicalities. A company that values engineering talent should prioritize a fair evaluation process alongside procedural consistency. Overall, this felt overly rigid and poorly handled. I would have expected a more constructive approach from a company conducting technical interviews."
