Behavioural phone screening followed by an easy in person coding assignment with the head of engineering. The person doing the phone screening did an admirable job being friendly and respectful throughout the entirety of our fairly long conversation. Unfortunately it only took a few prodding questions for things to full apart and become rife with red flags. Much of their pitch was about how important their culture and values were to them, so it seemed like an obvious question to ask for some specific ways the company protects and shares its values while hiring employees. The response awkwardly boiled down to "we make sure we're very selective in hiring people who have the same values as us", quite the ironic answer coming from someone who introduced herself along the lines of 'head of diversity and inclusion.' They put a lot of emphasis on being "all in" and putting in overtime to make the company successful, but every single representative of the company I talked to hastily backpedaled on that point when pressed for details. Seemed to have a lot of idealism, unfortunately the points fell apart under a slight amount of scrutiny. The technical screening coding task was very easy and we had plenty of time left over to chat. The interviewer behaved decently initially, said some strange things about how foolish weakly typed languages are, how great Typescript is, how most of the founders were from California and how Toronto wasn't much of a scene for "engineering excellence" but Setter was going to change that. He said they were specifically looking for people who weren't afraid to take risks and stray from the "safe path". I thought it would be appropriate to tell a story about a conflict at previous job where an incoming non-technical manager's political interests conflicted with the needs of my team and our customers, but the interviewer really didn't like that. Partway through he suddenly became very condescending and took full advantage of the interviewer-interviewee power dynamic to basically hint that I should learn my place and go "enjoy the nice weather". Seemed like a really great guy to work for, I'm sure that he enjoyed his power trip and that he wouldn't mind me sharing that given how 'excellent' he is! I couldn't help but be intrigued by the pattern of Glassdoor reviews on this company's page; an enormous spike this summer with a string of deeply negative reviews followed by a string of hollow-sounding 5 star reviews, and how every recent critical review is immediately followed by a string of gushing reviews spouting the same undoubtedly HR/marketing-approved content. Add another red flag to the pile! Looks like yet another company that virtue signals with lots of nice-sounding words when marketing itself but fails to put much thought into how to follow through ideals.