Interviewing here was one of the most bizarre experiences I’ve had interviewing. After the phone screening, I was set up with a 2.5-hour interview that was half behavioral and half “technical”.

The behavioral interview part was great. The managers were very personable and asked intelligent “think of a time when…” questions that were fair and enjoyable. That was where the good stopped.

Then I was brought on with two engineers for the technical section. They started with trying to clear up confusion on whether I was a front-end or back-end engineer. I told them I am primarily back-end but have some front-end experience and am happy with either a full-stack or back-end role, depending on the need. They didn’t seem to understand this and mentioned that they wished front-end engineers were interviewing me instead, and they were only back-end engineers. I again mentioned that I am primarily a back-end engineer with some front-end experience and tried to assure them that it’d be fine. They again didn’t seem to understand.

For a moment, I thought they were going to postpone the interview and try to get a front-end engineer to interview me some other time, but we proceeded with the interview.

After I introduced myself and my background, they expressed surprise and worry that I didn’t have any Java and Spring Boot experience. Nothing on my resume said that I did, and I didn’t know this would be such an issue since the job description also listed my exact back-end tech stack as something they’re looking for.

They proceeded to ask a number of systems design questions, which unfortunately for me involved some questions around technologies I only had tangential experience with, and which I couldn’t answer very well in-depth. The questions were about technologies not in the job description. I would think that if you’re looking for engineers with in-depth knowledge of NoSQL and SOAP, you would put it in the job description. And if it is important for candidates to know Java, do not interview them.

But fair enough, I did the best I could.

Then came the coding “challenge”. They messaged me a link to some online development environment and then asked me to reverse letters in a given string. This is a ridiculously simple test for a senior engineer role, but I figured, hey, it’s better than the difficult LeetCode questions you usually see, so great for me. So I typed in “puts string.reverse”, clicked Run, they said they were satisfied, and we moved on after only a few minutes. I assumed they would then throw some harder code problems at me, but no, that was all the coding there was.

The rest of the interview was spent asking me quasi-riddles (look up the Die Hard 3 and clock angle problems). Now, these are problems that afterwards I was kicking myself that I couldn’t easily answer them, but after 2 hours of interview stress, I’m not in my best mental form. I also couldn’t shake my frustration at being subjected to these antiquated interviewing practices.

Also, the problems, I felt, were asked in a strange way, with a lot of added little details that made me wonder how it must be relevant and made it sound like one of those trick questions that some interviewers like to ask that have no answer and which, in actuality, they just want to hear how you try to problem-solve.

At this point, my fried, frustrated brain was just done, and I fumbled through the rest of the interview.

I was sent an offer, but it was a lower level than the senior role I applied for because the engineers said I was “poor on coding”. What part was poor, I wondered – the one line of code that took me seconds to write or their logic riddles?

The interview and this feedback left such a bad taste in my mouth that I declined. If this is the kind of company that scopes candidates based on answers to riddles, then it frankly isn’t the kind of company I want to be a part of.

Print a given string in reverse.