My experience interviewing for a Solution Architect role at EvenUp was deeply disappointing because it felt like a sterile, scripted exercise rather than the high level dialogue I was led to believe would take place. Although I asked for the full hiring pipeline upfront during initial recruiter outreach, they withheld the existence of a high effort take home case study until the end of the call with a member of the SA team, where the interviewer leaned heavily on a rigid STAR rubric and was clearly unprepared to discuss actual architectural challenges. Because of their lack of preparation, I found myself doing all of the heavy lifting to keep the conversation substantive, yet they remained stuck in a cycle of basic behavioral questions. The requirement to sign an NDA before we even discussed the technical scope felt more like a containment strategy for their internal bottlenecks rather than a standard business practice. Between the inability of the interviewer to engage in a genuine, off the cuff exchange and the obvious bait and switch regarding their process, it became clear that they are more interested in harvesting intellectual labor than vetting senior talent. I withdrew from the process because this entire experience was a perfect example of why modern hiring practices have become so broken, extractive, and disconnected from the human element of professional recruitment.