Rome2Rio interview questions

I did 2 interview rounds: first was a 30 minute chat with HR, then a 1 hours interview with the hiring manager. I then never heard back, they ghosted me. It’s a shame, as the interviews were great, they were friendly and knowledgeable. At least an email saying they were no longer hiring would have been appreciated.

I first got a phone call screen interview from the HR. After the phone call, I succeeded in moving to the next stage, a coding exercise which, I think to most applicants, is easy and common in the industry. If someone use chat-gpt, they can quickly generate a solution template for this exercise. The description of the exercise also seems very positive and easygoing, saying it's not intended to be a hash exercise, all it matters is the thoughts and ideas behind. However, there is no clear standards as to how the code is gonna be evaluated, so in summary, a very subjective, unclear, cliche, and seemingly easy coding exercise. I submitted the code and reconnected with them two weeks later, and they welcomed me to move to the next stage, a 3.5 hr devloop interview including a 20min academic-level presentation on my research work. I spent hours preparing the slides to tailor it to Rome2Rio's potential applications outside my daily work. However, long story short, after a series of drama, I was told that I would not proceed to the next interview with all my preparation in vain. The reason they gave me is that they reevaluated the "coding standards" and decided that I didn't meet them, which I found was very amusing as I absolutely adhered to the exercise descriptions... They never bother to even vaguely explain what these standards are! My advise to them is that they really need to make these standards clear in the exercise descriptions, and most importantly, make their exercise harder and possibly live so that no one can use chat-gpt to bypass it (I coded the whole thing myself anyway). Overall, the whole interview process became very unclear and ridiculous after the coding exercise. Nevertheless, I still send them the slides I prepared and hope them all the best to the future interviews.