I interviewed with Homeward recently for a Software Engineering role.
This company is a good old boys club that caters solely to their elitist boomer crowd that they coddle to ensure they don't have to speak about the uneasiness and unrest at Homeward. The employees in the interview seemed tired, uninspired, and not friendly.
Attended 3 rounds and a final round. It was clear that the interviewers were ready for a boxing match. As they interrogated me throughout the interview without any regard to how their questionable means at " interviewing" seemed more like an interrogation session. Didn't appreciate that type of grueling debate about how you don't believe I did xy&z 5 years ago at a previous company. Taking someone's experience for face value will help you retain candidates and allow them to want to come work for you. I was not able to feel like I would want to work at Homeward for the long term. No doubts many others in the interview did not want to be there too.
No live coding, but they made me attend a pre final assessment and also asked me to build a student registration portal that they make you bring to the final round, which was a bit much after the 40 question pre take home assessment - but this was only the beginning of the fun with Homeward.
I was overwhelmingly surprised by the minimal valuable and worthwhile responses to my conversations with the team or lack there of, during my interview. In terms of engaging in a professional conversation about what work I've previously done, they couldn't do this successfully enough to make me want to work for Homeward. Instead, they allowed their interviewers to essentially harrang you about where you've previously been employed under the guise that your in an " interview " with them so it's ok to be a disrespectful person just for the sake of it. Be very careful interviewing with Homeward, as it was an extremely unprofessional interview process. The interviewers, even engineering managers seem oblivious to real standardized attacks that could take place and security breaches aren't of high concern at Homeward, they are more trying to figured out how to deploy their hosted applications as they seemed to be migrating from heroku to aws and using elastic beanstalks. Why not do that from the beginning and not use ELB?
At the final stage after the final interview, the recruiter made it his job to Ghost me. Asked him via LinkedIn for any response about next steps or even a denial. Awful company hands down. I'd honestly recommend you do not respond to the recruiting talent here, as they will take immense efforts to ignore you. Avoid at all costs, as you know you can and deserve to work for a decent company. This is not one of them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about how you'd handle a SQL injection attack on our systems.