Had an 45 minute introductory call. I almost didn't answer because I received the call over 5 minutes late. Most of the call was the interviewer talking at me more than listening to anything I had to say, which whatever, I was happy to hear about the company.
The first red flag was they have unlimited PTO, but upon mentioning it, the interviewer was pretty intensely gatekeeping it, so really it wasn't unlimited, it was at the discretion of someone who clearly wasn't a fan of letting the employees utilize this benefit.
The second red flag was they use Heroku instead of AWS directly. When I asked why, the interviewer got real defensive real fast with a short answer about how they could use AWS if they wanted to but just didn't have time, etc. Yeah right, in my experience, the ONLY reason anyone uses Heroku is if they have no clue how to use native AWS.
Third red flag was there were a lot of big promises being made. Some quick searches show promising activity with this company but it all completely died off about 18 months ago. The interviewer insisted that they would be profitable with the next year... heard that one before. No thanks.
I was given a code challenge, which was to write an API with one endpoint that accepts a CSV with potentially random fields, and then attempts to parse out only a specific list of fields and saves them to an in-memory database. This was supposed to be completed within 1 hour. I didn't do it because I decided I didn't want to pursue the job.
