First, I received an OA with a series of multiple-choice and programming questions. They weren't difficult, but time was tight.

Then, I received a normal and standard phone screening.

I scheduled the interview. The interview was booked for an extremely long timeslot (4 hours).

Upon entering the interview call, there were 2 interviewers, and they greeted me in Mandarin Chinese. Prior to the interview, I had not made any indication that I spoke Mandarin, so they assumed I could speak the language based on my last name alone.

I am only conversationally fluent in Mandarin, but when it comes to any technical jargon or domain-specific topics, my Mandarin knowledge is extremely lacking. I told them about my limitations in my Mandarin-speaking abilities, but they disregarded my concern (probably since superficially I sound fluent) and continued the interview speaking Mandarin.

For about 3/5 of the interview, it was just answering a long series of LeetCode questions in C. They explicitly told me that they didn't need me to talk while coding, just to code up the solution while they observed my coding style. Essentially, it was a proctored OA where you sit in a call with one of their engineers who watches you work silently.

Well, it would have been silent had one of the interviewers not had a noisy background. One of the interviewers left very shortly in this phase of the interview.

Once I was done with the gauntlet of LeetCode questions, the remaining interviewer asked a series of behavioral and technical questions. As I mentioned before, since my Mandarin is terrible when it comes to technical jargon, I had to request the interviewer to switch the language to English.

Overall, I think I was a complete cultural mismatch and a very odd interview where I felt dumb for not being able to speak their language of choice to the level I needed.

A ton of LeetCode questions, but they need to be done in C. Managed to answer all of them except for one question, which was the sole LeetCode-hard question.

One code review question. A bunch of random technical and behavioral questions.