Received email from hiring manager, booked a 15 minute call where things were pretty dry. Seemed like the manager just wanted to get through the day and yapped about generic things. Explained me the interview process, starting with a take home test. The interview process link I received said they don't do leetcode style interview, but lo-and-behold, the question was absolutely leetcode intensive. I don't do well on such rounds. alas! I wouldn't blame them, they're building a team and they know what they want. Cool company though.

If you’re checking Glassdoor because you just got another take-home coding challenge, haven’t talked to a human, don’t know the salary range, and think this might be a Linkedin scam, I’m here to help. After passing two coding challenges, I pressed to talk to a human. Upon asking about the salary I was told it was “competitive”. Upon further pressing I was given a real number. It was not, in fact, competitive. I was then given a 3rd take-home coding challenge. I had the correct answer but was cut off for time while finishing the implementation. I was rejected. All three coding challenges are essentially identical — Python algorithm questions. The difficulty mostly comes from working in their editor without error highlighting, proper completions, control over the terminal, or auto-save. My advice is to not go further until you’ve talked to a human. Be sure to ask about their “rigorous” interview process and “competitive” salary to understand what you’re getting into. If a small startup isn’t transparent with its interview process or salary, is that really where a strong engineer would go?