Telmate Interview Questions
& Process

I had a phone screen, coding challenge, and then an onsite interview. The phone screen was pretty standard, just talking about my background and learning about the company. After that, I had to do a coding challenge where I refactored a Rails app. The final step was an onsite that took a little over 2 hours. It was mainly about culture fit, but they also asked me to explain the code I wrote for the challenge and some other practical web dev/Rails questions. Everyone was really nice, so it was a good experience overall.

So I had this initial phone screen, then my first onsite was with the CEO. The second onsite had me meeting with product owners and some of the junior folks. They then asked for another round where I'd work side-by-side with people. After the second onsite went well and I spent a good chunk of time with them, they requested a third round and wanted me to work for them for free. That's when I decided enough was enough and pushed back, feeling it was a bit much to ask someone to essentially work for free after leading them on. I had already gone out of my way a couple of times to make their difficult schedule work. After I pushed back on their third request for an onsite, the recruiter got kind of passive aggressive and things stalled. The whole thing took so long that I actually found two other offers that were better.

I was called in twice for onsite interviews. After the first one, they sent me a reject the next day. Then, a recruiter contacted me a couple of weeks later with good news about an offer. A few days later, I was called in again for an onsite interview with mostly the same panel, but one person was different. They rejected me the next day! The recruiters and other staff gave very misleading and contradictory information, which wasted a lot of my time.

I had a phone screen with HR which had easy questions. Then I had a face to face interview with the hiring manager. They didn't greet me or shake my hand. They didn't ask me questions about my skills, but asked a lot about the organizational structure of my previous companies. The hiring manager seemed clueless about my resume and my experience.