TLDR: If you aren't game to be an AI code monkey, don't bother continuing in the interview process with this company.
Interviewed with Invisible Technologies for the Forward Deployed Software Engineer position, and I want to warn future candidates about a process that is equal parts unfair and unreasonable as it pertains to assessment expectations. Looking at their actual reviews tab i.e. former employees' experiences (take a look if you haven't already, it's quite the delight), it's not a surprise that I had such a distasteful experience.
Interview with the recruiter: Learned about company structure, that the role actually doesn't require tons of travel (it’s all client dependent), work, and the under market rate salary. Recruiter was extremely unpleasant, often cutting me off in our initial conversations to interject and critique my own statements regarding my skills and background. Unsure if it’s a lack of training or if it was an attempt at being 'helpful', but I found it very off-putting. Decided to be professional and thank said interviewer for the feedback, even though her 'insights' were fairly meaningless and irrelevant considering the position I was interviewing for.
On to the take home: I was given 70 minutes to adhere to a ridiculous product spec:
1 - Service Interface (signup, auth, account holders, accounts, transactions, money transfer, cards, statements), 2 - full DB design (implementation, type safety, indexes, scalability design, transaction handling, security practices), 3 - an entire Terraform infrastructure, and deliverables (haha): tests, markdown with setup, API documentation, architecture diagram, security considerations, AI usage report, a VIDEO walkthrough, and test client application.
Quite literally impossible even with a relentless pace and copious Ai usage. It was a multi-day take home, instead squeezed intro a single hour session. There's no way to get AI to generate this level of code perfectly with a full test coverage and feature completion, absolutely no time to debug, test, integrate, or verify correct Terraform operation.
My actual takeaway is that Invisible Technologies has a disjointed interview process with individuals who are placed in positions of power with no actual ability to code and have ridiculous expectations for candidates. They actually want candidates who are going to deceive, submit garbage spaghetti vibe-coded products with cut corners. They want survivors with questionable ethics, no commitment to quality, in order to lowball them. Another interpretation is that you will be expected to template out a large amount of this code beforehand, which again seems deceitful and biased.
Cheers to dodging a nuclear missile.
