I was contacted by a recruiter asking me to interview. In the initial phone screen, we spoke for 30 minutes about my resume. The recruiter emailed that day to ask for a follow-up with a technical person over the phone.

The phone interview was an hour-long collaborative coding session with a programmer who asked me to solve a sorting problem. It wasn’t difficult, and we talked about the solution while I was coding. The focus was on me having something that compiled and ran. The interviewer was enthusiastic and polite. It was a positive experience.

I was asked to come in for a longer interview, consisting of four technical parts and a meeting with one of the managers. I was asked to bring a laptop, but I don’t have one, so we organized for them to provide one preloaded with an IDE for coding.

For each technical part, there were two interviewers. Each session started the same: they introduced themselves and asked a generic “Tell us what you’ve been doing?” I was surprised none of them asked specifics about my resume, knew what I’d been working on, or drilled down into anything I said. I got the impression none of them had seen my resume and didn’t care about my previous experience. Given that, I wish I had paid more attention to the time and prepared an elevator pitch about myself so that I could have spent more time focused on the technical part.

It was immediately obvious that in many cases, the interviewers had no idea how to conduct an interview, either solo or with a colleague. I was frequently given conflicting instructions from the two interviewers or told to ignore something the other had said and answer a different question instead. At times, they talked insistently and loudly over the top of each other.

For the coding session, despite organizing to have a laptop waiting for me, it wasn’t provided, and the interviewer strongly rebuked me for not having brought my own. When I mentioned organizing one with the recruiter, they knew nothing about it. I ended up coding on the interviewer’s laptop in a basic text editor on an unfamiliar keyboard. There was no focus on actual output at all, and I couldn’t spend much time sitting down writing code because I kept being asked to answer questions on the whiteboard.

In a later session, I was asked a question and started brainstorming a solution with some pseudocode on the whiteboard. I was instantly rebuked: “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not going to be able to solve this using a function.” Later, while I was working through the code, I mentioned an edge case to check, and the interviewers were lost as to why you should check at all, then got annoyed when I explained that checking edge cases is something you should do.

There was a consistent theme of elitism and “we know better than you” with the interviewers’ attitudes. One person introduced himself with just, “Hi. I’ve been on this team for six months. Before this, I was at Google.” Another made sure to mention the Ivy League college they’d attended.

My last session was 1:1. After “Tell me what you’ve been doing?” he asked, “Why do you want to work at Uber?” I started to talk about things I’d been doing at my current job and how I was no longer challenged. He interrupted me with a disgusted look. “I asked why you want to work at Uber, not why you don’t want to work at your current workplace.” I explained I was doing that and continued with how, from my experiences, I had learned I was interested in things like cutting-edge tech, big data, etc., and I felt I could get that at Uber. I talked about how I like what they do and how great it is. He then deadpanned, “So, I’m getting you like technology, and you like Uber.” I was a little stunned at his attitude, but I honestly believe they have a great product, so I elaborated more on why I thought Uber was doing good things. He tried to justify his question: “I’m an engineering manager, and my success is based on the success of my team members, so I want to know what’s going to keep you here in four years’ time?” I was confused, so I asked, “Four years?” He said, “Yes, what’s to stop you from just packing up and leaving in four years’ time?” I wondered if he was being deliberately difficult to see how I would react. After explaining I didn’t know what he was implying, he asked if I had any questions for him. I asked several in-depth questions about the work they were doing, technical aspects, etc., but he was done and just wanted to leave. He turned side-on to me, faced the door, kept looking at his watch and out the window, and gave short, dismissive answers. The recruiter turned up slightly after that, and he left.

During the day, no one said to me, “Here’s why we want you to come work here and where we see you contributing.” No one said, “Here’s why you should be here instead of Amazon, or Google, or Facebook,” and no one said, “We have a great team here, it’s an amazing environment, and we love working here every day.”

Overall, a horrible experience.

What have you been doing in your current job?

Why do you want to work at Uber?

What’s to stop you from just packing up and leaving in 4 years’ time?