Sloppy, unorganized, and perfunctory. I felt that the folks were more interested in talking about themselves and trying to find imaginary issues in a future system based off your 1-hour code problem. There was no collaboration in the second half of the interview, and it felt like the interviewer was just there to check boxes. They were cold, condescending, and unfriendly.

They had a huge problem with 5 different facets they wanted you to implement in about an hour. There was confusion about the length of time I had to complete the task. They tried to stress that they were more concerned about accuracy and less about getting it all done. I asked questions to try and determine the outer limits of the problem and exactly how far I had to take this.

The first interviewer gave me assurances that I did not need to worry about a database or a REST API, and the prompt provided said that much too. However, that seemed to conflict with the expectations of the person “reviewing” the code. He seemed to be concerned with the implementation and how it would scale to being used in a database or API, all things I had asked the first person about. He told me to only worry about the inputs and outputs from the problem.

All things the first person told me to not be concerned with that the second person was way more concerned about.

They then started asking system design questions without any context as to the tech stack being used and tools available. I wouldn’t say the interview question was difficult per se, but the short amount of time and the large problem makes it untenable. The disconnect between what the first interviewer told me and what the second one was looking for was frustrating.

The second interviewer making assumptions about a tech stack in a system you didn’t ask me to design and then asking me questions about that system was maddening. His condescending attitude left a bad taste in my mouth. I called the recruiter and pulled my application after the interview.

They asked to read in some files, do some logic, and output the results to a file. They had five steps to go through in an hour. Then, they spent half an hour asking why I didn’t design it in a way that the prompts and other interviewer told me I didn’t need to do.