I had a very strange interview at Etsy.

Their recruiter took weeks to get back to me between rounds. When they finally scheduled my onsite, they didn't ask for my availability; they just told me which day to come in. This caused me to have to call in sick that day at my current job.

When I got to Etsy, it just got stranger from there. The office, although beautiful, felt nearly empty. The manager for the team I was interviewing for was sick that day, so I didn't get to meet him. Instead, they sent me out to lunch with a manager from a different team. When I asked about recent layoffs, he didn't seem prepared with an answer and acted annoyed that I had brought it up.

I was asked a variety of system design questions, which were a refreshing break from the data structures and algorithm questions I'm used to getting. Everyone was friendly, if a bit awkward.

But my last interview of the day was the strangest of all!

It was a remote interview, which the recruiter apparently didn't realize until almost 10 minutes had passed. I kept waiting for my next interviewer to walk into the room, but eventually one of my previous interviewers rushed in and turned on the TV for a video conference. A mistake like that can be excused, but it got worse. The focus was a question about designing a feature into a database, and the remote interviewer had some very strange opinions, far from best practices. I ran the interview by trusted colleagues later to make sure I wasn't mistaken about my design opinion. Everyone universally agreed that the interviewer had been insisting something very odd about the correct usage of enums. It felt like my entire interview fell off the rails at that point.

After that final interview, the recruiter met with me and walked me out of the office. Overall, it was a very strange day with very strange interviewers.

How about we store these foreign keys to user IDs as enums in a different table?