Start off with a call a recruiter: Enjoyed this. The recruiter was friendly, knowledgeable, and made me excited about the role. The topics were pretty typical.

Next came a screen with the hiring manager: D.O doesn't really do whiteboarding or anything like that so this was a structured conversation.

This is both good/bad. I didn't have to hit LeetCode or anything but the interviewer and I did not really "vibe" which made the whole conversation uncomfortable and didn't lead to great discussion. Got a read that they "didn't want to do this", but who knows.

Might have been an off day (for them or I) but just for context of what I mean: minor normal social things (Oh that's an interesting virtual background, my pet walked into frame, etc etc) were met with flat, terse responses.

The questions were setup like a conversation but ended up feeling like there was both too much structure and not enough at different points. Before we got to the questions it was emphasized to me 3 times to introduce myself "briefly". When I'd finish an open ended question the realtime feedback was "that's probably OK" and something was checked off and we'd go to the next one.

After a few brief questions we moved into asking about my projects + a theoretical one to talk through. This sort of discussion relies on a nice back-and-forth so it ended up being unnecessarily difficult and awkward.

Describe a project

Here is a theoretical project X, and what do you think you would add in order to accomplish Y?