The first step was an online interview. It was very good, with normal questions about me, my experience, and my interests. I also had to solve a simple coding task and describe how I would test it.

Then I received an invitation to an onsite interview. After two weeks of preparation, I flew to Oslo.

When I arrived at the office, the receptionist simply asked me to wait for the first interviewer. There was no speaking with HR, no tour of the office, and no information about the team. Nothing at all.

Okay, no problem. I waited for the first interview. I had a long journey (a flight with one stop through Germany), but the first question from the interviewer was, "Do you live in Oslo?" They knew nothing about me, not even that I had flown thousands of kilometers for the interview.

They did not provide any information about the position or the areas they might ask about. Given that my CV is full of web experience, this is exactly what I expected, along with typical questions about algorithms and data structures. However, I was very wrong.

The first interview was more or less okay. There were typical theoretical questions about C#, then a small algorithm task.

The second was very good. The task was related to trees; I solved it and discussed its time complexity.

The third was really strange! Instead of questions related to my experience and typical computer science issues, they asked me some odd things like "writing objects into files using streams." What? There was a very long preview about user permissions, and I thought the issue was related to security, perhaps requiring me to develop an auth service or something similar. But after the preview, they asked me to… write a security object to a file. At first, I even thought I hadn't understood the question correctly. Why would I do that? For what purpose? It was a task without any context – just write an object to a file. Okay, I did it, of course, with lots of clarifying questions because I had no idea what I was doing or why. The task itself was kindergarten-level in terms of difficulty, but the way it was presented was amazing. I still cannot understand why they didn't just ask, "Write an object with integer, boolean, and string properties into a file" – and that's it! Why spend our time explaining useless information about user permissions if the question was absolutely unrelated to security?

The fourth interview was better than the third but still strange. There were normal tasks, but with several suggestions like, "Let's assume this, let's assume that."

After the interviews, I waited for a whole month! Only after I sent an email asking, "Is there any feedback?" did I receive a rejection email the next day.

That was one of the strangest interviews I've ever had. A simple task without context became something without any sense, and you are expected to solve it in a better way.

A long preview with a huge amount of useless information, then a simple question like, "How would you write an object of that type to a file?"