I was referred by an engineering manager there, so my first interview was with a staff engineer.

This was the worst interview experience I've ever had in my 10+ year career, working at 7 companies and conducting numerous interviews in between.

The interview is based on silly LeetCode-style brain teaser questions designed to make candidates fail if they haven't specifically studied for them. It rewards luck in seeing a previously encountered question, allowing for memorization of the algorithm and answer, rather than actual real-life software engineering skills.

My first question was very specific to Java/C#. My main language was JavaScript, and I was asked to implement thread pooling in a language of choice. This is very Java-specific, and since JavaScript is a single-threaded language, it didn't make any sense.

The second question was a LeetCode problem. I was asked to solve this LeetCode question: https://leetcode.com/problems/rotate-image/. The task was rotating a 2D matrix clockwise. Good luck figuring out how to solve it in your brain, let alone writing it in code.