I completed the technical challenge and received very positive feedback from the engineers. As a next step, before interviewing with a panel of engineers, I had to meet with one of the managers. This was step was not good as this was not really an interview or a discussion.. The manager did the vast majority of the talking and didn't ask me a single question about my experience. In other words, this steps wasn't your standard interview, it was more like a follow up, informal, 'do you have any questions we didn't answer' kind of interview. While the meeting ended on a semi positive note, after a few days I received minimal generic feedback that based on the meeting with the manager I did move on to the next round. This was quite silly and didn't match the way the interviews went or my experience history (which was never discussed with the manager). Overall this whole process unfortunately served as a huge waste of time. My conclusion is this. The company is a start up and operates as you'd expect an early stage start up would. Based on the discussion with the manager, collaboration with colleagues is infrequent, meetings are viewed as a 'waste of time' and the workflow doesn't seem very stable. I'd proceed with extreme caution and ask lots of questions before considering this for your next career choice as it seems like a wild-wild-west kind of development environment.

The first round turned me off a bit because I felt like I was being over-sold the company and the interviewer ended up talking more about his own accomplishments and asked nothing about me at all. I felt like I was being given a sales pitch. I wasn't really excited about working with the guy I interviewed with. Anyway, I decided to go through with the coding challenge, even if it was just practice for future interviews. Admittedly, my reservations about round 1 meant that I didn't really put my heart and soul into the coding challenge. Also, I found the challege to be biased toward people with a specific kind of knowledge. If you had that knowledge going in, you could probably nail it very quickly. However, I ended up having to spend a significant chunk of the alloted time familiarizing myself with the central concept. Of course, that put me at a disadvantage. My solution worked pretty well (it passed the provided tests) and was somewhat clean but if I had more time it would have been much better. If I were a less honest person I would have just spent a few more hours on it and submitted something that was near perfect. Long story short: they didn't like my code and it was painfully obvious. The follow up interview to discuss the code was very painful. They seemed to only ask me "how would you make it better?" in a bunch of different ways. At some point I just got really uncomfortable and just wanted it to end. Before the end of the meeting I knew that if by some miracle they wanted to move forward that I was definitely not going to move forward.