The interview started off great! The interviewer, who I will not name, began by asking me what I'd been working on recently. I told him about one of my side projects (a Node.js-based web app) that I found both interesting and worthy of note.

He started asking me questions about my project, which was a useful exercise. This was useful, except for the fact that he never offered any sort of constructive criticism and never gave any indication of whether my answers were good or even acceptable. He also continuously cut off my train of thought, which became a theme of the entire interview. This is when I started feeling like the interview would probably not go so well.

Once we moved past him asking questions about my side project, and after he explained several times that he loves "freestyling" the beginning portion of the interview, he moved on to asking me questions he had prepared.

I don't remember the exact wording of his question, but it was essentially: "Create a function that grabs an HTML element and, within a specific time period, changes its color."

As might be obvious, I had a few questions right from the get-go. First of all, what is this specific time period? What do you mean by "change its color"? What color? I asked these and more questions, but it took some time to get a solid answer out of the interviewer. This was another theme throughout the interview.

While attempting to solve the problem, I was trying my best to speak out my thought process, as per all advice for doing interviews. I noticed something. The interviewer seemed to always audibly set his phone down and turn it on speaker mode. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was typing down his interview notes. That being said, it was extremely distracting and gave the impression that he wasn't paying attention to what I was saying.

I mentioned before that he continuously cut off my train of thought, and this still holds true. Most often, when I was asking questions, I would have a follow-up question because he was being (perhaps purposefully?) vague. Whenever I asked the follow-up question, I would almost immediately be cut off while he tried to describe something unrelated to my question but related to the problem I was solving. Initially, you might think that whatever he cut me off to say was important, but I can assure you, none of it was ever helpful.

After about 15 minutes into the coding problem, the interviewer cut me off in the middle of me explaining my thought process to tell me that I now had access to two new helper functions. I know he did that because I was struggling a bit with one part of the problem, but he also kept telling me I didn't need to modify my original code in order to make use of these new functions, which I thought was strange.

He also kept pointing out portions of my code that might not run correctly, and then when I would respond by trying to solve those problems, he would cut me off to say, "We don't need to worry about these," and would tell me to move on.

And without any warning, after around 25 minutes into the problem, he said, "Okay, we're done. Do you have any questions for me?"

I asked him, "Do you like where you work?" He responded with a very convoluted answer that was 90% him explaining he started his own company and then interviewed with Google once (he really emphasized the "once") and got the job there. He didn't even give me an answer the first time I asked.

It felt very much like he was looking down on me, and the word "tool" came to mind several times. After I finally got that answer out of him, he said, "Alright, time's up, nice talking to you, have a good one," and hung up all of a sudden. I didn't even have time to say "bye" before he hung up.

Overall, the coding problem portion felt extremely rushed (a problem that could have been easily remedied by not "freestyling" the beginning of the interview) and was very confusing and frustrating due to the vagueness of the interviewer's answers to my questions and the constant unrelated comments on the interviewer's end.

The entire interview felt extremely unprofessional, and I couldn't help but think the interviewer had something else to do or didn't want to interview in the first place. I wouldn't want to work with this person, let alone have him interview potential employees. He seemed self-absorbed, wasn't good with his communication skills, and looked down on me. I'm okay with not being offered a job knowing that Google employs people like him.

Create a function that grabs an HTML element and, within a specific time period, changes its color.