The first interview was great. The HR person was very welcoming and explained all the details about the job position. The second part of the process was a code challenge that I had to complete in five days. The code itself was a little tricky but manageable, though it still required a lot of work and was time-consuming. After the code challenge, I was invited to a technical interview where two employees asked me questions about development, problem-solving, and had me explain the code I wrote for the previous challenge. At the end of this phase, they told me they would only continue the process if I agreed to a lower position—Mid-level instead of Senior Software Engineer. I agreed, and the process moved on to the manager's phase. During the manager’s interview, I was asked many technical questions about a minor app project I had worked on in a previous job. They asked me to explain how it worked and why I had built it that way. They posed many questions about why I had developed the project "this way" instead of "that way." I understood why they were asking those questions, but at one point, their questions no longer made sense for the scenario the app was designed for or the timeframe we had when creating it. I already knew I had been rejected when one of the interviewers said, "We want someone who can start contributing to our team quickly..." The entire process took around two months.

I have been to many interviews and my experience with Ria Financial was the worst of them all. It really seems that there is a culture problem at the company. If respect is not afforded to the candidates, then I cannot imagine that the coworkers treat each other with respect. 1. Interview was conducted over Zoom call. I had my camera on for the entire interview, but both of the interviewers did not turn theirs on, did not mention why they decided to keep theirs off. First time that ever happened in dozens of interviews and tech screens I had. 2. They introduced themselves in a sense that they stated their names, but I have no idea whom they were, what were their roles or whether any of them was in fact a hiring manager. 3. They did not talk about the role at all. There was absolutely no conversation about the team, its size, work, needs of the team, how the role fits into the team. 4. Perhaps my biggest frustration was that the questions asked were barrage of trivia questions that any engineer should be able to answer with 15 seconds of Googling. There were no questions where I could demonstrate my experience in solving problems or if I would be a good cultural fit. I think I should be paid for my engineering experience not for my google skills. 5. Interview ended abruptly 15 minutes before time. Needless to say I was not given a chance to ask any questions about the company, role, expectations for the role. Basically they hung up on me. Obviously I had interviews where I shined and where I was embarrassingly bad. Even when I embarrassed myself before the interviewer, the interview was always respectful, courteous and ending on a good note. Interview with Ria Financial was none of that.