This seems like your average three-stage interview:

• Recruiter Call: A typical recruiter call with some technical questions taken from a PowerPoint to filter candidates.
• Remote Live Coding: A set of small programming problems using the HackerRank platform. I was expecting tricky questions and complex programming competition problems but was pleasantly surprised by something very approachable. The interviewer had a great, supportive attitude and was a delight to work with.
• Onsite Live Coding: The structure is a 4-hour interview with two sessions, each lasting half the time. Both sets of problems were interesting and offered the right amount of technical challenge for such interviews.

My first set went smoothly (I think). Great two-way communication, sharing what I did and what I could do, provided more time and headspace to refactor. I managed to achieve all the objectives that were requested.

The second set, with a new set of interviewers, presented a problem that was again easy enough. I tried to convey my thought process and communicate. There was a small language issue, and in one of the objectives, I misunderstood the desired output. After I achieved the wrong output, another interviewer clarified what they wanted, and I managed to recover quickly. Although it took me some time to reach the answer given my nerves at the moment, I recovered and felt pretty good. I tried to soften the atmosphere a bit with occasional comments and smiles, but all I got were sour looks. I felt something was wrong then.

Further down this session, I hit a bug where the output I was expecting was not being achieved. Being pressed for time, I went to my usual quick debugging strategy: I put in some console logs, made some assumptions about what I should be getting, and then crosschecked with the reality of the code execution, which would give me more information to uncover the issue. All of this was communicated aloud, so I believed my intended approach was clear. Here is where things went sideways (I think).

One of the interviewers started pressing me with an annoyed tone of voice. "Can you please understand the code you're writing before trying to run it," one of them said. This took me off guard and threw me off balance, as I believed I was being forced to approach the problem as they would have done it and it left no room for the process I explained I wanted to follow. I did as requested, and it took me longer. I think they believed I just run code without understanding it, where in reality, I want to run the code to find why my mental model of what I wrote differs from reality—my way to do this is to check against reality (running the code on an actual computer, not my already biased mental model of it). From then on, I felt a sour energy from this interviewer.

On a similar issue later on (being a long interview), I went to my usual process, and this time I was hit with the same sentence as the last time, in a very patronizing tone. This time I did not remain silent and further explained the process that I intended to follow. This time the interviewer seemed to have understood where I was coming from and let me proceed. Of course, I fixed the bug in a couple of seconds and then, to show that I understood the code, I tried to explain in detail what the issue was. I was cut off at this moment with an "Okay, move along, we get it" kind of response, which really threw me off this time.

I moved along and managed to complete all the requests and questions that were being asked of me, except one last question about achieving a certain output. I must confess I felt super tired and uncomfortable at this moment, so the interviewer gave up and told me the answer. I felt super dumb at that point because this solution was staring me right between the eyes, and I could not believe I did not reach this conclusion. I blame this on being tired at this moment (after more than 4 hours of hard thinking) and what I perceived to be a total lack of kindness and empathy from the interviewers from about the halfway point of the session.

After this, I thought I did pretty well, actually. All things considered, I wasn't expecting to be perfect but competent and confident in my knowledge, which I am, so I thought I would most likely get the offer.

I didn't get it. After consulting with some friends who applied and did not get in as well (extremely talented engineers with a long list of technical achievements; I'm talking unicorn founding engineer level), a familiar topic started to creep in. It says on their careers page that interviewers want you to succeed and will guide you through the process, but from my second session, I thought (even before knowing I did not get the offer) that their intent is to filter you out. So, if you're interviewing there, a lot of your success will depend on whether you get a gatekeeper set of interviewers or not. I certainly won't be applying again, as I'm not fond of a game of chance.

I won't reveal specific questions, but they'll be nothing outside of your standard interview questions. Read "You Don't Know JS Yet" by Kyle Simpson cover to cover. Learn it by heart, and you'll be fine JS-wise for this and all future interviews.