I applied for the position via LinkedIn. A few days later, a "Senior Technical Recruiter" reached out to me via email to schedule a phone screen. This particular recruiter only had one available time slot two weeks out, which I booked.

The "Senior Technical Recruiter" went through the normal recruiting questions, asking about job history and what I'm looking for in my next role. They then described a few roles they had open and asked about my experience in them. To be very clear, this was a "Senior Technical Recruiter" hired by and working for Peloton, not some third-party recruiting firm.

Full disclosure, I am not a software engineer, have never been a software engineer, and have no desire to ever be purely a software engineer. That being said, I can code when needed and have many years of documented projects showcasing that I can code. I made this very clear to the "Senior Technical Recruiter" during the earlier stages of the interview.

Then they (and I am paraphrasing here) hit me with this:

Them: "So you have never been a software engineer?"

Me: "No, I have not."

Them: "Then it is very misleading to put X years of experience in Y programming language on your resume. It's basically lying."

I don't know how anyone can claim to be a Senior Technical Recruiter, or why a company would hire anyone to be a Senior Technical Recruiter, when the idea that experience in programming languages is only gained by being a Software Engineer. Once they called me a liar, I told them to withdraw my application from the role.

It was the standard "tell me about your experience with [insert tool here]" and "talk to me about [your job history here]" due to it being a phone screen.