They gave me a takehome test and immediately ghosted me after I sent it, incredibly unprofessional. The test itself was refactoring a jquery page, probably a good intro to their work. I wish I hadn't wasted my time.

Take home exam after recruiter call. Honestly an immediate red flag. You can google their take home exam and see examples online. No clear direction and criteria for judgement is unknown. No chance to ask questions to understand what they really want so if they don't see something very specific on their rubric, you probably won't pass. They couldn't even get my program to run despite very clear instructions on the read me. I assured them it works and later emailed me again saying that they had the wrong version of python running. Seriously? What kind of 3rd rate SWE couldn't figure that out? If someone at my job at a senior level had to email me asking me this, I would be shocked. The feedback they gave was that my program didn't return output in JSON format when the expected output they gave me was not in json format and i adhered to that exactly. Furthermore they stated my makefile was not an actual makefile. Here the definition of a makefile: "The makefile is a text file that contains the recipe for building your program." which is exactly what I wrote. FURTHERMORE, they had sent an email with a questionnaire of behavioral related questions for me to fill out instead of conducting a real behavioral interview. One of the questions was how I preferred to work and I very clearly indicated that I preferred a collaborative environment. One of the feedback I received was that i "prefer to work by myself". At this point, I think they mixed me up with a different candidate. Moral of the story? DONT DO HOMEWORK FOR THESE COMPANIES. DONT WASTE YOUR TIME.

Overall the interview process was extremely smooth and transparent. Agree with the other poster here that Vistar was a pleasure to interview with. First there was recruiter reachout, pretty standard basic questions about your background and to see fit. This was followed by a take-home assignment with a few writing prompts to see your writing style. Take-home assignment is timeboxed, but you're able to spend as much time as you want on it, it isn't too difficult and there are definitely resources online to help you with some aspects of the problem. The take-home is something actually interesting, and I enjoyed completing it. Once that was accepted, you have two interviews back to back, one a quick algo question, nothing too complicated, they just want to see your process. Very clean, and collaborative coding to the solution, with a few minutes for questions at the end. Second hour was a systems design interview which I did not do too well as I didn't have much experience in this area. But I took away a lot, and the recruiter followed up with very helpful feedback from the interviewers. Everyone at Vistar was a pleasure to interface with and really enjoyed the opportunity with them. No hidden gotchas or convoluted leetcode problems asking you to do something that you'd never ever do on a job.