I was randomly called with no warning or scheduled appointment. I was then asked low-level operating system questions, as well as trick questions about how languages like Python and C++ are compiled. Though this was a "Software Engineering position," the description was Data Science/Machine Learning. The phone screener essentially asked me irrelevant questions to the position (or what seemed irrelevant) and then said he was taken aback that my background in ML and AI didn't translate to his knowledge of low-level CS.

Q: Describe to me the steps that C++ code takes to get to machine code.