Got contacted by a recruiter and accepted a call. Standard initial tech/background questions. I was going to be working remotely. This was clear from the beginning. After this got scheduled for a 1 hour paired-coding exercise on CoderPad. This was a Front-end focused role, so interview consisted of using react. That was a nice, real-world tech assessment that I appreciated. Everyone was very nice as well on the team. Then I was scheduled for another 2.5 hour loop-style interview panel. I met with 6 people across 4 meetings. All were pleasant, and the interviews went well, lot's of friendly communication. The recruiter let me know that everyone was positive and things went great. Then they scheduled me for an extra interview with someone I had already interviewed with (the manager overseeing the team I was being interviewed for). The recruiter thanked me for accommodating the extra step. After the whole process, and after getting everyones approval (including the person who scheduled this extra meeting), I was then told vaguely I wasn't a good culture fit at the moment. It turned out the company wanted to transition to in-office only and dragged me for a couple weeks for no reason. Big waste of time.

Very fast process. Recruiter call, first round communication with the tech lead, two tech tests a day apart. First one was a sorting issue on a shared codepad, second was a standard template architecture kind of thing. I recommend either having a whiteboard or using a tablet to quickly sketch for the architecture interview. Interviewers were more interested in stuff like file structure of a front end than "real" software architecture. There was also two other interviews with tech managers and product managers. Everyone I talked to was nice and empathetic to the stresses of actually doing these kinds of interviews, a refreshing change from most of the tech interviews I've been doing recently. None of the interviews had the "let's quiz this person on Javascript/React/CSS until they break" trivia that's popular with some certain circles. The only thing that was really disappointing was getting an HR portal template rejection letter. It would've been nice to hear some real feedback or even a "Hey, this was a tough one but we'll keep you on file." kind of thing, after doing all those rounds. Despite the rather cold rejection, I would recommend the process, and the team should keep doing what they're doing.