The process took more than three weeks. By the time I had an on-site interview, I had four very lucrative offers from big companies. However, I decided to proceed with the interview mostly because I was interested in personal finance.

I was contacted by a recruiter and we had a short call. The first step was a call with the hiring manager. The second step was the phone screening. The phone screening was a simple coding question. The on-site interview was where the red flags started.

As a senior engineer, I work with three languages: Java, C, and Swift. While understanding the languages and underlying frameworks is important, learning framework syntax by heart is not something I would like to do.

The interview was not meant to evaluate abstract thinking or iOS proficiency. It was not appropriate for a senior position. That probably explains why I was mostly interviewed by interns and why the company was having a hard time finding and retaining senior engineers.

I was provided with a laptop and asked to create a simple app that displays a list of items and allows users to search them. I was only allowed to use Apple documentation.

I was interviewed by two guys, and neither was very encouraging. At the end of the hour, I said that I didn’t think either of us enjoyed the format and wanted to go home, but we proceeded with the second question.

I was given a magic map that does all operations in O(1) and was asked to implement a function that returns a random element from the map. The tricky part is that it has to be uniformly distributed based on values. For example, given a map that has values 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, the number 4 is 3 times more likely to be returned than 3, and 1 is two times more likely to be returned than 3. I did pretty well but felt like the two interviewers were not very helpful.

I wanted to go home again, but instead, another intern took me for coffee. The guy was from Germany, and we had a nice chat. We toured the office, and I was shown all the cool benefits they have, like free snacks and a catered lunch. The office looked like a cramped aquarium with engineers sitting so close to each other that their shoulders were almost touching. After the tour, I was told that I could go home now.

It was pretty clear from the first interview that I was not a good fit for the company, since I was not excited to demonstrate my super-coder abilities, so I wasn't even sure why I was kept there for so long.