Instead of the originally planned interviewer, I was talking to a substitute. The call was plagued by a terrible connection quality on his side. He essentially went through a catalogue of low-level programming questions, most of which I could answer, at least conceptually. The entire style was very much interrogation-style with no effort to make the candidate feel comfortable. I had to repeat myself again and again on details like concurrency issues and floating-point numbers since he did not really put in even minimal effort to understand what I was saying. All in all, the outcome is certainly not the result of inability. I believe this company seriously needs to improve their recruitment.

From what I read in other reports, I am not the only one hit by such a strange interviewing style. Probably one has to get lucky not to be interviewed by one particular engineer to have a normal phone screen.

many c++, hardware architecture and floating point minutiae.