The initial steps were standard, but the technical round with two engineers was highly unstructured and fell far below industry expectations for a Senior iOS Developer role. Rather than discussing scalable system design, relevant architectural decisions, or real-world use cases, the interviewers fixated on arbitrary details from old, personal GitHub repositories. When I mentioned I couldn't recall the exact reasoning behind a specific line of code from a past side project, I was given condescending remarks like "if it's linked on your CV, you should know it by heart." It felt like a cheap "gotcha" tactic rather than a mature technical discussion.
Furthermore, standard methodologies like the STAR framework were completely misunderstood. When I highlighted my specific individual contributions to past projects—as is standard practice—one of the interviewers explicitly called me "rude" for using the word "I" instead of "we." The live coding portion also lacked any technical interaction or guidance. The entire session felt less like a collaborative assessment and more like an ego-driven interrogation.