1st call: Software Engineer Manager reached out over LinkedIn and asked about my background and experiences over a call. This was pretty much a lighter version of a hiring manager interview, which would usually happen at later stages of the interview process. I thought it was a nice change from the usual recruiter routine of asking basic questions about myself, because we were able to dig deeper in my experiences and the interviewer has a technical background to understand it. phone technical interview (coding on hackerrank codepair): - no introductions, straight into coding - the question was supposed to be a multi-part question, but all parts were given at once which influenced how I approached the question - the top priority was to produce compilable, running code using hackerrank codepair's feature of running the code, some of my thoughts around this: - interviewer did not seem engaged, it's one of those cases where it could just be nobody there and I was to do a 1 hour coding challenge on leetcode/hackerrank - interviewer was not interested in design approaches, time/space complexities - a lot of time were spent on making it to compile and run, (I was using Java) so fixing brackets, method calls, missing libraries, etc, which I thought was not a good use of time for the interview. In the end my code didn't run and I think it was ultimately the reason that I got rejected. - One tricky part about using Java is to deal with instantiating an inner class in the static main method (solution can be found in stackoverflow). I'm not familiar with Python but I can imagine it will be simpler to produce running code in Python, which puts an advantage to interviewers that know Python - It is true that I need to produce working code in an actual work environment. But I wouldn't need to do it under a very limited timeframe. I would also need time to design, implement, write tests, alarms/monitors etc. I would also have advanced IDEs to work with instead of Hackerrank's codepair which is far too inferior. one other thing was that I had to reschedule the phone interview because it wasn't very clear in the meeting invite that I would be using the video call feature within hackerrank codepair to talk, instead of the google meeting link in the meeting invite, which resulted in missing my first interview. I think it'd be worth it to clarify that in the meeting invite, and change the video chat part to Google Meet because it has a bigger screen to see the interviewer better.