No Offer
Negative Experience
Difficult Interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Pluralsight (Lehi, UT) in July 2016.

Interview
In house recruiter contacted me, and a quick phone call led him to send me the code challenge which was to be solved in either C# or JavaScript. It was a problem about dependencies and essentially building a simple package manager. It was challenging but quite fun. I solved it and sent in the personal description document which asked stuff about experience and ideas and methodologies that I subscribed to.

Quickly thereafter I had a video interview with 2 engineers that was very pleasant. We talked about my experience, what I liked, how it was to work there, mostly just if I'd fit in. I was excited after talking to them.

A day later a different HR person contacted me to schedule a half day on-site interview. The interview started with lunch with a couple devs, which was a little awkward and they didn't seem to want to talk to me much and were pretty quiet, but we had a decent chat about coding and regular life stuff. I was a little put off by the conversation, but my stomach was full of good food so I was ready to start coding.

When we returned I was set up at a pair programming station with a lead, and was tasked with building a simple full-stack implementation of a feature that an internal team requested. The language I primarily dealt with there was C# which I don't have a lot of experience with, but I picked up the framework and language quickly and banged it out with time to do a bit of styling. I liked this because it was a real world problem that was something I'd do on the job. There was a lot of noise from the boisterous team behind me and I struggled hearing my pair programming partner throughout.

Then I had a Q&A with another 2 devs, which went really well and I felt was friendly and professional. Lots of good jokes and they had me whiteboard a "system" and then explain it. This was a stark contrast to the lunch conversation, and I was pumped talking to them.

Finally they led me to the second pair programming station. The dev that was to be my partner asked if I wanted something to drink and I said water. They didn't have water. That was weird. So I took some other colored sugary beverage that was less appetizing.

This guy was totally unprepared. I don't think the computer was even on when I got there. He asks my favorite text editor, and proceeds to try to get a different one working. It didn't work, so we tried another. It didn't work, so we restarted the computer. 15 minutes later finally we find one that works, and he asks me to use JavaScript to build a table that contains some information pulled out of the Star Wars API filtered by the skin color of characters. I thought it was very dumb and contrived, and joked that we should have used the Pokemon API to be relevant to the spirit of the times. He didn't get it, and didn't laugh.

I finished the functionality and style of the problem in about 20 minutes, with absolutely no help from him. I thought it was supposed to be pair programming, but this one was an awkward quiz and he didn't touch the keyboard once. He was on his phone about half the time though, which was very unprofessional. Then he tells me to refactor. So I refactor it. Then he wants me to keep refactoring, so I keep refactoring. Then he tells me to make it functional and don't use loops, so I do so. When it was satisfied he wanted to show me how he would have done something different. He made a mistake in the code which I called him on, and he was visibly annoyed by it.

When the clock struck 4:30, he quickly ushers me out without leaving me any room for final questions, and says I'll be notified about next steps one way or the other within 24 hours. It was a Friday and I obviously expected to hear back on Monday. I sent an email when I didn't, and another a week later, and another a week later.

I have been completely ignored and they went cold after wasting a few days of my time with no response whatsoever.

The last guy I interviewed with, plus the lack of any communication since then, completely ruined my experience and I STRONGLY discourage anyone from interviewing there.

I had a very negative overall experience. I wouldn't have moved forward if they contacted me. It was very crowded, noisy, disorganized, no personal space, unprofessional overall, and literally every single person in the office was a white male between 25-35, and I'd venture a guess that 100% of them are of the Mormon faith. So you or I wouldn't fit in.