Initial Telephone Interview with a member of the team discussing coding practices, current attitudes to working and the future of the company’s development team. The second stage of the interview process was a small code test.

I was given a take-home assessment after being shortlisted. The brief I received beforehand described the exercise as: A fairly straightforward SQL task with a clear right/wrong answer. A system diagram that I would review and answer questions about (free-form). A failing test case where I would refactor code to make the test pass. Overall, these sounded like standard and reasonable tasks. In practice, however, the assessment differed somewhat from the description: The SQL portion was as expected. Instead of reviewing a provided system diagram, I was asked to design an API involving external services and justify my design decisions. Rather than simply refactoring to make a failing test pass, I was given a larger API project where part required refactoring and an additional endpoint needed to be implemented. None of these tasks were inherently unreasonable. The main issue was the timeframe: the entire assessment was limited to 90 minutes. Given the scope SQL, API design, refactoring, implementing an endpoint, and producing a system diagram (in Hackerrank’s diagramming UI) the time constraint felt unrealistic. My concern wasn’t the technical difficulty, but rather that the time allocation didn’t seem aligned with the scope of the tasks, and the exercise differed from what had been described upfront. A slightly longer timeframe or clearer expectations would have made the experience feel more balanced.