1st interview - via MS Teams, 1:1, 45 minutes, lead by a senior developer. The interview was purely conversational, with the interviewer prompting to explain common software development terminology and best practices. The topics were async JS, test case design and implementation, AWS services, front-to-backend workflow, API security, and some questions about previous experiences. Overall the interviewer was very thoughtful and easy to relate to. 2nd interview - via MS Teams, 1:3, 1 hour 15 minutes, lead by a senior developer and a mid-level developer, junior developer attending. The interview started with a practical programming task, which was a simple array transformation - solvable within 10 minutes with no outside resources. The conversation part was a programming bingo, during which the interviewers were trying to coax me into uttering exactly the phrases that they had pre-decided should be said. Somehow it turned out that it is not possible to read another person's mind. At one point an interviewer asked me to repeat back to him exactly what he had said earlier. They pretended that there is a performance issue in their system to be solved, and when it turned out that there was no issue, they wanted to keep pretending. I find it unlikely that anyone could share an imaginary reality with complete strangers, while being judged on whether you are imagining precisely the right thing out of everything that could be imagined. One of the interviewers seemed to think that the way their system works is the only way an information system could work, or THE way all information systems should work. I was expected to answer questions in the context of their system, despite never ever having been presented with an overview of the architecture or functionality. The few computer science questions that were asked in a direct manner were alright. The topics were: compression ratio, binary data encoding, browser developer tools, testing, sql explain plan, performance troubleshooting. The rejection letter said that they "felt that the flow of the conversation required a bit more prompting than expected". And on my side it felt that the conversation was poorly lead and deliberately set up to confuse. Simultaneously, there was a sense that they really, really wanted me to succeed at their mindgames, and got upset at *me* for not knowing the rules *they* were making up. We ended up, on both sides, with an impression that the other side needs to work on their communication skills. In summary, for someone who only cares about learning and getting stuff done, the company looks amazing from the outside. But that only definitively means that they have an effective marketing department. It may be that I dodged a bullet. Mindgames is not my forte, nor I have interest in them - that's why I studied tech.