This was an especially bizarre and dehumanizing interview experience, even in a bizarre and dehumanizing market. The recruiter was very tight-lipped. I felt like I was ferreting out state secrets when trying to figure out basic information about the loop, information that has been freely disclosed to me by recruiters at every other company where I’ve interviewed. It took a few emails to learn that there would be “several rounds” of “coding.” When I joined the interview, the interviewer talked about themselves and the company for a couple minutes before linking to a LeetCode-style problem. At no point did they ask me a single thing about myself, my background, what I saw myself bringing to the job, my relevant work experience, whether I had any questions about the company…nothing. Why care about the fact that, without being asked, I implemented testing and deployment pipelines from scratch that have saved us from disasters, or the open-source contributions I’ve made, or whatever, when there’s LeetCode to do? I’m sure the interviewer is very nice and is simply too busy, but the vibe was very much “prove you’re worthy of our time and then maybe we’ll treat you like a person.” I was pretty thrown off by this and I’m sure my flailing with the easy-level problem just gave the interviewer/company further justification for treating candidates like this — why waste time listening to total idiots before they prove themselves, right? Obviously I just need to practice more and not care if the interviewer isn’t even pretending to care about me. But I actually have performed well and even solved LeetCode hards in interviews, believe it or not…the weirdness of how the interview began was just really something. I wouldn’t find this experience all that unexpected at a FAANG, but it is kind of strange to me to treat candidates like this when you’re looking locally. This is a fairly small tech town and you cross paths with people over and over. I wish them luck in finding the imperturbable LeetCode crusher of their dreams.