I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks.

So everything about this process was actually very smooth and enjoyable until the final interview. First is a chat with the hiring manager or director about yourself and the role. It is fairly typical, talking about your resume, your interests, and etc. The next round was technical, but not LeetCode. It was essentially slowly building out a class to handle some behavior, and each next step was to handle more logic and continue fleshing out the logic. It was also very enjoyable.

Then there was actually a rather delightful behavioral interview. It is fairly typical, but we wrapped up rather quickly, and I had a nice chat with the interviewer and was given ample time to ask any question that I had. Now the final round was supposed to be a systems design loop. Given that this wasn't a pure SWE role, I got confirmation from the recruiter that it was mostly DevOps oriented—think CI/CD more or less. So with that knowledge, I spent a good deal of time refreshing my knowledge, making sure I could talk about auto promotion strategies, why you would want to have a singular image to promote across environments, and etc.

Now when the actual interview itself started, the interviewer himself quite literally stated that since he was higher up on the food chain, he can more or less just YOLO it, especially since he thought the questions were stupid, which were his words, not mine. So instead of it being a system design loop, it was a resume deep dive. Okay cool, it was not what I was expecting, but sure. Well, it turns out the guy legitimately thought I was lying about myself. He thought I used ChatGPT because I had an awkward bullet point, which I wasn't sure how to react to, because if anything, LLMs have a particular prose and style that is pretty much the opposite of awkward.

He point-blank did not believe that I did anything I had outlined on my resume, and after roughly maybe 15 minutes or so, he said, "I've heard enough," and just decided to talk shop to kill some time, and just ended it a bit later. Truth be told, after I found out, I was pretty bothered, but that's how it goes sometimes.

How do you handle vagueness?