The first interview was fine, mostly behavioral questions. Then I was given a take-home coding problem and scheduled 45 minutes to discuss my results. At the code review, the interviewer asked extremely vague, open-ended questions and got visibly annoyed when I provided correct and optimal answers that weren't the answer they wanted. There were lots of "okay, sure, I guess that would work but what else could you do?" and "okay, yeah, but what else?". They never provided any context, requirements, or constraints that would help me pick one solution method over another, even when I directly asked. When I finally stumbled onto their personal favorite solution method, their face lit up and they were engaged for a few seconds. Then I explained that that solution was highly inefficient for the question asked, and the interviewer didn't like hearing that. I've given hundreds of interviews and I train junior engineers on technical interviewing, and this is not an effective way to assess candidates. From there it devolved into a quiz on syntax trivia. I hope most of the company's teams do not operate this way. They sound like a really cool company and I hope they're successful.

The questions were about string parsing and sorting, which was nothing complicated.