The "technical assessment" was actually just me fixing…
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The "technical assessment" was actually just me fixing their production bugs for free
I just spent nearly five hours of my life on what was supposed to be a standard technical deep dive for a backend role . Everything started fine with some high level architectural questions but then the lead dev shares his screen and pulls up a private repo. He tells me they have this "stubborn legacy issue" that's been stalling their sprint and they want to see how I handle a real world scenario instead of some stupid leetcode puzzle. At first I thought it was a cool way to interview. It felt practical and I wanted to show off my debugging workflow.
The environment was a mess of undocumented dependencies and spaghetti code that should have been a red flag immediately. I spent three hours digging through logs and tracing service calls while three of their senior guys just watched me via screen share like it was some kind of twisted twitch stream. I eventually found the race condition causing their data corruption and even wrote a patch with a couple of unit tests to make sure it stayed fixed. They seemed happy and said they would get back to me by Monday.
About an hour after the call ended I went to check their public status page because the product name was stuck in my head. I noticed the exact service I was working on went down for maintenance and came back up ten minutes later. Out of curiosity I checked the frontend headers and saw the versioning had bumped. I am almost certain they just pushed my interview code straight to their live environment.
I feel like a complete idiot now for basically providing free consulting under the guise of an assessment. I checked my email and there is nothing from the recruiter yet. It is one thing to ask for a code sample or a logic test but having a candidate resolve a blocking issue in your core product during a first round interview is insane. I am honestly debating if I should even take the job if they offer it because if this is how they treat people who don't even work there yet I can only imagine the nightmare of being on call for them. The whole thing just feels dirty and exploitative. I guess I learned my lesson about doing live coding on actual company repos without a contract .
#business
source
I just spent nearly five hours of my life on what was supposed to be a standard technical deep dive for a backend role . Everything started fine with some high level architectural questions but then the lead dev shares his screen and pulls up a private repo. He tells me they have this "stubborn legacy issue" that's been stalling their sprint and they want to see how I handle a real world scenario instead of some stupid leetcode puzzle. At first I thought it was a cool way to interview. It felt practical and I wanted to show off my debugging workflow.
The environment was a mess of undocumented dependencies and spaghetti code that should have been a red flag immediately. I spent three hours digging through logs and tracing service calls while three of their senior guys just watched me via screen share like it was some kind of twisted twitch stream. I eventually found the race condition causing their data corruption and even wrote a patch with a couple of unit tests to make sure it stayed fixed. They seemed happy and said they would get back to me by Monday.
About an hour after the call ended I went to check their public status page because the product name was stuck in my head. I noticed the exact service I was working on went down for maintenance and came back up ten minutes later. Out of curiosity I checked the frontend headers and saw the versioning had bumped. I am almost certain they just pushed my interview code straight to their live environment.
I feel like a complete idiot now for basically providing free consulting under the guise of an assessment. I checked my email and there is nothing from the recruiter yet. It is one thing to ask for a code sample or a logic test but having a candidate resolve a blocking issue in your core product during a first round interview is insane. I am honestly debating if I should even take the job if they offer it because if this is how they treat people who don't even work there yet I can only imagine the nightmare of being on call for them. The whole thing just feels dirty and exploitative. I guess I learned my lesson about doing live coding on actual company repos without a contract .
#business
source
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