I applied online, and they got back to me with a coding challenge on Hackerrank, that had 5 technical questions and 2 algorithm coding challenges. Following that, they told me to come in a week later for some 1:1 interviews with some developers.
I was interviewed by three different developers who were all fantastic. They were really friendly and got me really excited about Thalmic Labs. Most of the interviewing was behavioural, with some technical questions, and I got a chance to ask a lot of things about working at Thalmic and the development process.
After the interview, I was followed up with a take home assignment the following week, this is where the fun stopped. I was asked to create a simple front end app for viewing, posting and deleting events in React with a provided API backend. Simple enough, I started the app from scratch using a very simple Webpack configuration with Babel and SASS, then developed the application with Redux. I spent hours on organizing and documenting my code (I believe that it is quite possibly the cleanest code I have ever written), I even deployed it to Github Pages, however, after submission, I was told that my code was 'unreadable' and that I should redo it using the boilerplate they provided. I believe that their team may not be familiar with Babel or Redux, as I do not understand why they were unable to read the code. So I spent the weekend re-doing the assignment using their provided skeleton, and converting my previous SASS into LESS, and resubmitted it.
I was then told after a couple of days that they would not be moving further with my application. I spent over 50 hours working on their assignment and re-doing it the way they wanted (I do not think they even looked at the redo), and they could not even give me a reason as to why my solution was no good.
I was told the last part of the interviewing process is to interview one of the co-founders.
I guess I managed to walk away with some good React practice...