The Screener It all started with an unsolicited email. I booked a screener call, was dazzled by the 98MM in series A funding, the salary (CAD$120k!), the remote-only culture. Sign me up! Take home technical The first round is a Codility screener, 1:50 long, with three questions: One was a simple CSS grid layout, one was creating a username and password input in React and the last was creating a function that added an emoji to a string or something. Fine, easy. Cultural interview Eight days later, I had a 25-minute interview with an engineer. He somehow spent the whole time making coffee. He asked me some questions including describing my "technology story". He asked me if I had any questions and I asked him to describe Elemy's short-term challenges. Apparently hiring is the main one which showed, he had only been there five weeks at the time and everyone else I interviewed with was basically a new hire. He told me that he was completely redoing the backend for the three apps (one patient-facing, one therapist-facing, and one clinic? facing) that they make and all three apps were going to share a single backend instead of each having their own. The offshore development team that came with the initial seed money apparently over-engineered the Rust backend and that now needs to be replaced with a DB monolith. A Pause Then, nothing for two weeks. I had gotten lost in the CRM. Oy! System Design Then, I had a system design interview with a staff software engineer, Frontend. It was mostly pleasant and I thought I did okay. He showed me screen captures of Twitter and asked me various design questions that are below. He was nice, he said that he actually hadn't done much programming since he came on board several weeks ago, he was mostly doing hiring work. Technical This round for me was a Codility question proctored by another engineer. The question was around JS promises and requesting and parsing some mocked API responses. I bombed at it, which made the next two interviews feel futile, but I decided to proceed because they were already scheduled immediately following. Product I was asked a couple of HR-style questions which are below. He also asked several questions about business intelligence software which my current role doesn't involve, and I had no idea I was going to be asked about it. Also, there were a lot of questions about new customer acquisition on the public-facing website and getting information from those analytics and BI software. He seemed to interpret a question I had to mean that I didn't understand Elemy's business model —which in fact I did — and told me that Elemy was like Uber for Austim therapy. They match parents with therapists and make money as the middleman by charging a fee. So The Final Boss Finally, the last boss. He mostly talked about himself, his career history, and a fair bit about his family also. He really wants engineers to take accountability for their code. He hates the idea of programmers just handing their stuff off to QA and forgetting about it or blaming other people or departments for their failures. So if you talk to him, talk up your incredible attention to detail and accountability. He also compared Elemy's business model to Uber. He talked about some of the technical challenge he was trying to solve, and echoed the problems with the back-end design that the SD of Eng brought up. He said that hiring was a big one and that they were almost exclusively looking to hire in Canada and South America due to the high cost of US-based developers. Also, they seem to be hiring for a variety of seniorities, both mid-level and senior. It sounds like they have dozens of positions to fill, or at least that's the impression he gave me. He told me that I would have an answer or "feedback" as he put in a maximum of two days and that they were really good as a company not making candidates wait since that was something he hated in his own career. That turned out to not be true. The End I waited for 11 business days before emailing the recruiter to see what was up, although I knew it was a no. He sent me back a nice but uninformative rejection saying I was too junior. The entire process took seven weeks. My general impression of the company is that it's a chaotic hiring machine and you may get lost in the shuffle. There is no way to preview the product. The product is also completely changing its back end, so that's something to keep in mind. Also, everyone seemed to look at my Linkedin and not my resume.
