The interviewer didn't show up for our first meeting, with no notice at all. I really wanted to interview with Deel, so I followed up myself and arranged a new time. That set the tone for the rest of the process: I was the one chasing them at every step, and it never felt like my time was respected. Communication was unprofessional overall, with frequent typos and disorganized emails. The technical stage was a coding challenge (LeetCode-style). All test cases passed except one, which was hidden, and nothing in the exercise description made it clear what it was checking for. I received no feedback afterward, despite asking. By the time I got to the coding exercise, I already had second thoughts about the company. Overall, this was one of the worst interview experiences I've had.

Nettes Gespraech mit dem Hiring Manager, auf das ein kleiner Case folgte mit ein paar Fragen zum Ende hin. Alles in allem ein wohlwollender Prozess und sympathisches erstes Interview. Bin gespannt auf den naechsten Schritt.

I interviewed with Vika. She asks if Im willing to work more than 8 hours a day and be on duty during weekends with no extra pay. Im pretty sure thats illegal in Spain. But whatever I tell her Im willing to do so. She proceeds to send me the take-home challenge which consists of a "5 hour" node.js project that implements an API to deposit user balances, among other things. In reality you will spend 8+ hours in this challenge. I made sure to read other reviews on here and made sure I focused on concurrencies and transactions. Plus went the "extra mile" and added some unit tests. After a few days my application got rejected with the following pros and cons from the exercise. It seems as they did not even check the code as they lied about the cons of my implementation. They said: PROS: Prevents pay job twice, Transaction for pay job, Safe concurrent update of job and balances, Uses a sql aggregation for calculating the sum of unpaid jobs, Prevents negative/invalid deposit, Transaction for deposit, Admin aggregations in sequelize, No excessive use of transactions, At least 1 test. CONS: Prevents deposits to another user's account, Prevents sql injection, Project structure by domain (or similar), No queries in routes/controllers These cons were not even true to the exercise implementation. To which I replied: - You cannot effectively deposit into another users account. The balancesRouter.js implements the logic to prevent doing so. - You do not mention input sanitation in the instructions. Sequelize already prevents SQL injection by default when using parameter methods. - There are no queries in the routers. They call services and repositories. - You do not specify any requirement on the project structure. It uses a classic layered structure with service-repository separation. They then replied doubling down on input sanitation and project structure. Their engineering team discards candidates "at will" even when following all the exercise instructions. They really think "input sanitation" is a reason to discard this exercise with all the pros I highlighted. Yes bro I can implement proper concurrency and db transactions but input sanitation is out of my skill level. Ok bro. What a joke. Do not waste your time with this company.