The interviewer was unprofessional, rude, and pompous. To provide a brief background, I'm an engineer from a big tech company and have interviewed many people and applied for jobs myself.

I scheduled an interview with them two weeks ago. When the time came, there was a no-show. I waited for about 15 minutes until I had to contact the recruiter, who stated there was a system failure.

Today, I had the follow-up interview. The interviewer was two minutes late, but this is usually within limits, so I'll let it slide. The interviewer cut straight to asking questions, which I appreciated as it would give me more time for the test and later for my own questions. However, their tone was rude and demanding.

1. Java trivial questions, such as the difference between an abstract class and an interface. How does Java handle garbage collection? The interviewer constantly cut me off. Perhaps I wasn't answering what they wanted, but it was simply rude. The connection was also quite spotty, so I couldn't hear their questions clearly. After I gave a high-level overview of my understanding and admitted I wasn't familiar with the specifics, they merely smirked and said to move on to the next question.

2. Talk about past experiences Both the technical recruiter and the interviewer pressed me about a past experience where I stayed for less than a year. I explained, but they didn't seem satisfied with the answer but moved on quickly. They also asked many questions about my current project, some of which I had to state I couldn't disclose.

3. Coding questions Find the sum of all values under a specific node in a tree. After asking some basic questions, I proceeded to walk through my algorithm before implementing it, but the interviewer kept asking rudely, "Why are you assuming this is XXX? This is wrong; you are not understanding my question correctly." To be fair, I was making some assumptions, and all their questions were valid, but again, the attitude was obnoxious. I was able to come up with the correct solution, and we promptly discussed scaling the system to meet large requirements.

Overall, I firmly believe one bad experience does not reflect the entire company. As mentioned, they were very nice when I interviewed onsite four years ago. Regardless, due to this experience, I'm not even waiting to see if I'll receive an onsite invitation and will be rejecting them.

To the interviewer, if you read this: My feedback for you is to tone down the attitude. I can tell you are a brilliant engineer and likely a fun person to work with once people get to know you, but this was not a good first impression and could potentially drive away talented individuals from joining your team.

Java trivial questions

Tree search algorithm

Scaling challenges