1. Phone interview with HR This lasted only about 10 minutes, basically just asking my background and what skills I possess and overall experience as a developer. I asked questions about the company, position, salary expectations, benefits, etc... and received very short generic answers. This should have been my FIRST RED FLAG. 2. Receive an Email with an assignment First of all, we hadn't discussed ANY details about the position and I still had many questions for the engineering team, lead engineer, questions about company benefits, etc. I replied with these concerns before beginning any kind of skills assessment. They did schedule a phone interview with a developer... which was the next step. 3. Phone interview with team developer Indian developer that had only been with the team about 1 month. Should have been my SECOND RED FLAG. But he did speak clearly and answered almost all of my questions about workflow process with the team, lead developer, code guidelines, and even provided some good insight about the company. So I did feel a little bit more confident about this being an actual developer possibility. 4. Receive same Email with same assignment for skills assessment It was a PDF document with some badly translated directions and a rough mockup design. But overall, it seemed simple enough and I figured I would put a couple of hours into it just to see what kind of response I would get from their side. 5. Assignment Results Provided I sent the team an email providing them with a GitHub repo and a hosted website with the live project for them to test and be able to see all code used with anticipation of feedback. 5. Receive Email asking for updates to my project There was no feedback about what I did well, what could be improved... just simply "Please provide these updates." It was though I was working for them already yet still nothing had been discussed officially about the position. I replied that I would not provide anymore updates to the assignment until I received some sort of feedback, or more details about the position's offer. 6. Receive Email of denial "I do want to thank you for your time in completing this assignment and talking with some team members about the position, but unfortunately we will not be moving forward with you for this role. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors." Annnd that was it. No feedback about the assignment, no phone call follow up, nothing. CONCLUSION: DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME. Overall, this was definitely a learning process for me as a candidate for similar developer positions. I know now not to waste any of my time with "assignments" until official details are provided.

I had an initial phone screen for a front-end developer role with a nice person from HR. She told me that $100,000/year was high for that role, but it sounded like they’d pay at least $70,000. I would be okay with a lower salary at a cool company that does a variety of projects and teaches me new things, so I wanted to proceed with the interview process, which initially required a short JavaScript quiz online. After passing that, the HR person sent me a coding challenge. The challenge was an entire responsive page (the Sketch file had both web and mobile views with completely different content in the header and footer), including dynamic data from an API and deployment. The HR person emailed me, “We designed the assignments so that they should not take more than 4 hrs of developer time,” and wanted it back from me within 2 days. My husband has been a tech manager for many years and said he would have allocated 1-2 weeks of full-time work on a page like that. She didn’t ask when I was available to work on this project before she sent it, either. Knowing that this assignment was a tall order, and knowing that this company was expecting a lot of time from me without having invested any of its own time, I nonetheless decided to do the challenge because it seemed fun and I could always show it to other employers. Feeling rushed made the challenge considerably less fun, although they did end up giving me more time to finish. Still, I started to wonder… who decided that this was a four-hour assignment? Is this some non-technical person who is getting a lot of work done for free by pretending to hire? Is this a sweatshop-style company that just expects everyone to deliver things in unreasonable amouts of time without adequate compensation? I was definitely getting suspicious and thinking I had been seriously scammed. After submitting the challenge, they asked me to complete another technical round, this time a phone screen with two guys from India. I was told that the only times I could speak with them were at 8:30am or 7:30am on two specific days. I’m not sure why no one from the Santa Monica office could be bothered to speak or meet with me, but I agreed to do the 8:30am meeting. I’d already spent so much time on their challenge, might as well. After waking up early on a Monday morning, however, I saw a 6:00am e-mail from HR lady asking me to reschedule to another early time later in the week. At that point I was pretty angry - they can’t even keep an appointment for a really inconvenient time that they themselves provided? On top of seeming like a sweatshop, Anatta is clearly a company with some pretty inconsiderate employees. I did agree to interview with the Indian guys at 8:00pm later that day - they asked pretty easy questions (way easier than the initial JavaScript test), but it was hard to understand their accents. I haven’t heard anything from the HR person since then, but I’ve already lost interest. If it’s not a scam, they’d have to pay me way more than they’re apparently willing to pay.