A take home assignment which needs to be submitted in 24 hours. There are extra "bonus" tasks on every step. The whole assignment would usually take a week to complete, but they decided to force the interviewees to invest as much time as possible. The assignment is not well defined as it doesn't state some of the implementation details which need to be clarified. I could deliver it including documentation without any other bonuses within 24 hours. It was a scalable multithreaded solution and it took me roughly 16 hours to complete. It is not difficult for an experienced person, but it is a lot of work. The first review was that it is too complicated, but it was enough to progress to the next stage - in person interview with two people. The people were overall knowledgeable, I expected to go over my code and explain why they evaluated the solution as complicated, but it didn't happen. Instead during the talk it turned out they build single thread solutions only - my first surprise, but overall the discussion was good. I usually end my interviews with a few questions which help me understand more about the people and the internal culture: "What is the most exciting thing about this job?" - where people usually get excited about the coolest things they have done in the past. These people answered without any excitement at all. The second question which I ask is "Describe the best person for this job" - where people need to highlight the top skills they are looking for. One of the interviewers managed to get potentially the only possible wrong answer, he stated - "I guess I would clone myself", which made me instantly reply - "You won't be able to learn anything new like this". I got rejected on the next day without any further feedback provided. At this stage it is not important to know it anyway, but a few questions remain: "If you are looking to hire yourself, why would you interview anyone and waste your and their time at first place?" - that is more a question to Kraken. And secondly: "What is the actual internal culture around the people who evaluate and position themselves as the supreme value at Kraken?"
