A recruiter reached out to me and recommended me for an interview for one of the new grad roles. I failed the first interview, which is partly on me as I did not prepare much for it. This was considering that ByteDance was one of the first few companies I was interviewing with. However, the interview experience was bad.

The first part consisted of theoretical questions, and the second part involved a medium LeetCode question.

The interviewer was Chinese and could not speak English properly, making it difficult to understand what he was asking and saying most of the time. He seemed impatient and rude when I could not answer some of the questions clearly.

I actually managed to answer the algorithm question pretty quickly, but he did not ask me to run the code or even walk through how it works with him. I believe this might have been because I had already failed the interview before the algorithm question, as I did not answer well for a number of the theoretical questions in the first part.

This experience highlights the interviewer's lack of professionalism. I had over 20 interviews with other companies afterward, and all of those interviewers were much more professional than him.

I hope I was just unlucky to get such an interviewer and that other interviewers at ByteDance are better. Otherwise, I would be very thankful to have failed the interview, as I definitely would not want to work with such colleagues.

Lastly, a minor point, but he did not turn on his video camera for the interview.

The first part contained some theoretical questions, and the second part was a medium LC question.