My experience with the interview process started positively, but the final stage was deeply disappointing and left me with serious concerns about how the company evaluates candidates.
The process included a case-study assignment for an Enterprise Agent Solutions Developer role. This was presented as an interview exercise, but in practice it felt very close to unpaid product and architecture work under a compressed timeline.
The most frustrating part was the mismatch between the stated expectations and how the final evaluation appeared to happen. I prepared for the requirements as they were given, but the final panel seemed to expect me to infer additional priorities that had not been clearly emphasized. It felt like I was expected to mind-read what the interviewers truly cared about, rather than being evaluated against clear and stable criteria.
The final-stage interview did not feel like a fair or neutral evaluation, but based on favouritism that would be politically incorrect to mention here. The discussion felt adversarial, selective, and disconnected from the expectations that had been communicated beforehand. Instead of assessing the broader assignment against the stated requirements, the interviewers appeared to focus on narrow details in a way that felt more like searching for a reason to reject than evaluating the work in good faith.
There was also process inconsistency. Earlier in the process, there was confusion about the sequence of steps, including whether the case study came before or after another interview stage. I was also told that one stage would not involve live coding, yet the final expectations still seemed to lean toward a level of implementation precision, technology-specific assumption, and immediate recall that was not realistic for the scope and deadline of the assignment.
The timeline and expectations did not match reality. The assignment required broad architectural thinking, implementation, documentation, mocked integrations, AI-agent design, and production-level considerations, all within a very narrow and a limited window. That is not a small interview exercise. That is substantial work and the evaluation criteria should be explicit, consistent, and proportionate.
I also felt that certain technical expectations were treated as obvious even though they were not clearly required in advance. If a company expects specific technologies, implementation depth, or production-level behavior, that should be stated clearly before the candidate invests significant time. Otherwise, the candidate is being judged against hidden assumptions rather than the actual assignment brief.
To be clear, some communication from recruiting was polite, and I appreciated the positive comments about my architectural thinking, organization, and documentation. However, polite wording does not fix a process where the evaluation criteria feel unstable, under-communicated, and applied after the fact.
Overall, my impression was that the company expects candidates and employees to deliver work far beyond the stated role and compensation, creating a process that feels exploitative rather than fair or professionally balanced.