I had an initial call with a recruiter that included some fairly standard questions about my background, nothing really out of the ordinary.

The second step was a technical screen. This involved sharing my screen on a Zoom call and doing some live-coding in the language of my choice. Pre-written tests were provided.

The type of problem used, especially as a live-coding exercise, felt not too far off from having to do whiteboarding at a company like Google or Facebook. It really felt designed in a way that was not inclusive of anyone who may actually be a talented software engineer but not deeply immersed in sorting algorithms in really contrived scenarios.

It's basically a minefield for anyone who prefers context for the code they work with and has performance anxiety issues.

Implement a comparator class capable of sorting by multiple key/order pairs, each pair acting as a tiebreaker for the previous.