The initial technical interview is outsourced to another company. It was easily one of the worst interview experiences I've ever had. They make it clear up front that they prefer to hire people who have studied technical interview problems over the rest of us.

My interviewer had his camera off the whole time, which made me feel a little odd having mine on. More importantly, it led to issues when his audio kept disconnecting every few minutes. I had no idea until several minutes of me coding and talking to myself had gone by. We had to pause the timer while we tried to fix it.

Beyond the technical difficulties, the Q&A section was weird. I was to choose two categories of general software questions and answer three questions from each. One of my questions was blatantly from a category I didn't choose. I went out of category and was told I answered it correctly, but I can envision a scenario in which someone would try to stay within the bounds of the chosen category and provide a wrong answer.

There's a hard requirement of solving two of the three programming challenges in the allotted ~45 minutes. This is a very high bar for introverts who do not like coding with someone peering over their shoulders and asking questions while they're trying to think. This format in no way resembles what a real software engineering job is like. I completed the first problem and had my second solution passing all but a few test cases, but it wasn't enough to secure a second interview.

The worst part, though, was that I didn't even get to interview with someone from the company I was interviewing for. In this job market, it's a two-way street; I need to be able to evaluate my potential employer/coworkers just as much as they need to evaluate me.

To their credit, they offer a retry interview for all of these first-round technical assessments, but I declined. One bad experience was enough.

Can you hear me now?