I was contacted by a recruiter on LI in June and had an initial call. I received some initial boilerplate info, but not much about the team I should join as EM. We both agreed that the opportunity sounds interesting and decided to continue the interview process.
It took almost 1 and a half months to get the first interview. Before the first interview, I had already received 2 requests to complete my interview feedback (without having any interviews yet).
The first interview was a "technical round". I didn't get much info about what it should be about, except that this first round "should consist of questions to determine my technical knowledge" :)
The interview was online with 2 engineers who didn't seem very enthusiastic and did not look like they had done a lot of interviews in the past. The primary interviewer first read his notes about the company and the work they are doing, including a lot of internal acronyms, etc. When I asked what team should I join they didn't know. The second interviewer was half-present since he was preparing lunch for his kids.
After this weird intro, we jumped into the technical questions. This was a series of random technical questions with questions like "What's the difference between Java and Python?", "How do you implement a DB schema?", "How are indexes implemented in a DB? (not what they are for, but low-level implementation)" or "What's polymorphism?". The best was when we talked about API design and how I would use an auth token to authorize the users, the interviewer asked me "What types of auth token exist?". I'm humbly said that I had no idea and asked him to give me the answer, but he wasn't able to and said that probably Chat-GPT would know :D
With my 15+yrs experience working as an ENG and EM, I was able to answer the majority of questions but didn't have answers for some more "academic" questions that I don't think you need in real life.
After this interview, a few days later I received an automated email saying "At this time, we will be progressing with other candidates whose background and experience better align with our job requirements. ". Nobody contacted me and I didn't receive any feedback.
In a nutshell, I saw a lot of red flags along the way and I didn't get a good feeling about the company. I'm glad I didn't continue with the interview process further. Seeing how messed up is their interview process, I can't even imagine how it looks from the inside when you work there...