Two classic algorithms sections were easy for me.

One section included an algorithm task and a system design task with the team lead (the team I was interviewing for). I averaged solving the last one but I passed.

So, an intermediate stop here: on every interview, you have a chance to ask your interviewer any questions for 5-10 minutes at the end. I personally like to ask about the problems the team actually solves, why they need me, and about the system architecture in a high-level picture.

This helps you get some idea of the real picture of a service in the short time window you have to understand what you will actually be doing if you sign the offer and whether it will be interesting for you.

As I understood, the actual work was not going to be really challenging. Half of it was going to be targeted at MySQL databases, supporting and optimizing them. Half of it will be about doing some business logic in Go.

Sure, there is always space for a good engineer to create something new, but the time for it in these conditions could be shrunk.

Then I got some strange section with a guy who pretended to be head of the service/department (?) and still a software engineer. He received a bunch of sample questions about my former and current positions and one more ordinary algorithms task.

After that, I was notified I had passed all technical interviews and it was time to talk with the team HR.

This was the behavioral interview, in a nutshell. And this another interview with some random guy who seemed not to be well-known about his team and interested in interviewing anyone because all his questions were pretty default. On all my questions (except one) about company and team life, the answers were totally general.

At some point, I even doubted he was in fact working there and it's not a manager's cousin or anything like that.

And guess what? I didn't pass that interview because the feedback was: "the candidate's English was not really good at the interview, we are concerned about how he's going to fit in the team."

I'm sorry, but this is some clown fiesta. I went through all technical interviews with no problems in communication. I have a certificate of English level which is attached to my resume, and what do I come to?

The guy who is totally unaware of his team or just refusing to have any interest in his work and rejecting me (as I think, I can't say for sure) for going into details about my current job and projects and going in thoughts to get even more details, stopping my speech every time I hear my own voice in the earphones because the interviewer has speakers and can't prepare for the interview.

Aftermath: not really interested to work with these guys for now.

Algorithm - Some basic questions you can solve on Codeforces or Medium on HackerRank.

System Design - Design a unique ID generator.