Had call with recruiter 2 weeks after applying to describe role/company. Intro call with Engineering Manager the next day. Was given take-home challenge which was described as only needing 2-3 hours of work, I took nearly 5 hours to do it and I am a fast coder so this was severely underestimated and they didn't seem to care when I told them. Then had "virtual onsite" which was 3 hours covering technical to behavioral topics. The vibe I got from almost every call is that they care more about peoples personalities than skills, it seems like they want people who fit in exactly to their cookie cutter ideal of a person, which is really off-putting and came across as cultish. I received a copy-pasted rejection a couple days after the virtual onsite with no detail whatsoever as to why I was rejected. They don't owe me anything but having put in 10+ hours to the process it would have been nice for the rejection to treat me like a human. I think I would have hated working in such a cultish environment so I'm putting this one behind me.

Initial call with internal recruiter, who was very pleasant. Had a 30 min call with the head of engineering (who seemed excited) which went fine though the technical issues the company described facing seemed to be due to a lack of experienced engineers… or a lack of willingness to pay for technical solutions that handle their data requirements. Then had a live coding session with an engineer that couldn’t find much wrong with my solutions other than I didn’t use VSCode, his preferred IDE. Got notified the decided to pass a couple days later. My overwhelming impression is the company needs more experienced management and staff if the want to get past the current plateau.