The initial call with the internal recruiter was polite, professional, and normal.

The next step is a tech screen, a 45-minute live coding session. You are given two LeetCode-style questions, 20 minutes for each, before the interview cuts you off.

You are not asked about your resume, background, interests, or philosophy. Nothing. It goes straight into the tech interview, quickly and somewhat mechanically asking two "gotcha" tech questions.

The interviewer seemed bored mostly and uninterested in anything besides getting this obligation over with.

The process is mostly luck. Memorize a ton of LeetCode answers, and if you're lucky, you'll get a question you already studied. Knowing general algorithms, programming, or Big O notation means nothing whatsoever. Either you know the answer to these LeetCode questions, or you're done. Next.

Forget about how many years of experience you have. It's a silly process that produces little to no signal on your actual ability to work as a software engineer. It's a process that will make you never want to apply for another FAANG company ever again.

Verify an alien language and find the greatest distance between any two nodes in a binary tree.