A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn.

We set up a phone screen for a few days later. This consisted of basic behavioral questions and some technical questions, essentially questions passed to the recruiters by engineering to weed out very weak candidates.

Then I had a technical phone screen with an engineer. First, there was a basic coding question. The second question was unusual. It was a language-specific question related to modifying the default behavior of a certain class. I spent the rest of the interview, a long portion of it, trying to understand exactly what needed to be done and couldn't come up with a solution at all.

I then asked the interviewer how what he was asking could be achieved, and he told me about a similar class that would provide that capability. Since I had no idea about that class (and there's really no reason for anyone to know it offhand), I wasted a lot of time trying to solve something that I could never have solved. This felt like a trick question and was clearly a flawed way to assess analytical skills for a software engineer.

Afterward, we had a brief chat with the engineer about Facebook, but it was obvious that neither side wanted to engage in further conversation.

I received a rejection email from the recruiter a couple of days later.

A seemingly analytical coding question, which couldn't be solved at all if you didn't know a certain class.