I applied for roles in the Infrastructure team, which requires strong AWS, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, automation, and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) skills. However, my technical interview did not explore any of these skills.

Instead, it solely focused on one specific programming language that was not my "expertise".

At the start of the interview, neither interviewer introduced themselves or their roles. I had to ask them about five minutes in, just as we were about to begin the coding exercise. Another point to note is that they were seated at one end of a long meeting room, with the camera at the other end, so I could barely see their faces. At times, it was also hard to hear them, likely because they were too far from the microphone.

The interview process, in general, is very similar to those at top tech companies in Silicon Valley, except it was run by people who were a lot less professional.

After going through this process, it made me think that perhaps all the negative reviews were true about status becoming higher and more valued the longer one is an employee, with new starters seen as outsiders.

Only ask questions about the code you are writing.