I applied to the job via LinkedIn and few days later spoke to their recruiter. The call went great. The recruiter asked very few, general questions about my job history. Everything sounded good, including salary expectations. The recruiter mentioned the name of the hiring manager and said will pass on my resume to him.
Two days later the recruiter asked for a 45-minute video interview with the hiring manager. No details on what to expect. The interview was scheduled and the confirmation, to my surprise, mentioned a different person than the one the recruiter mentioned.
Few days later the interview took place as scheduled, and the person was indeed the hiring manager, and the one the recruiter mentioned was not.
During the video interview, the manager had no problem seeing/hearing me, but I had trouble hearing him, as his video kept breaking up and was out of sync with his speaking. I let him know of that. There was no resolution except that I said I would have to ask him to repeat if necessary.
He started by asking about my current job. I answered briefly, as my resume had outlined. I invited him to dig into any specifics that might of interest to him. He did not take up the offer. Instead, he dived straight into a technical quiz. That was un-expected to me, but I saw that he obviously had a script to run through, so I obliged.
He presented a vague scenario of a user experiencing a technical problem, and asked me how I would go about troubleshooting. I considered the problem and offered my first step to find out more about the problem. It was acceptable to him, and he immediately supplied more facts about the problem requiring further troubleshooting. He was basically amending the scenario as he went. This went on thus. Every time I came up with a step he furnished additional information taking the problem in a different direction. After many such twists and turns, the scenario had morphed into one that was a real puzzle to me, and I could not come up with a step just by thinking around this imaginary problem in my head. He then revealed something that he's aware that can cause this final form of the problem. The thing he said was plausible to me, but I told him that I had not actually seen it in my entire working experience, but I trusted that he had seen it and it was really tricky.
After that quiz, the hiring manager asked me to go through a coding challenge. He asked me to do it on Coderpad website but said he actually had not set up an account there for me. After a bit of searching around, he said to just use a Google word doc which he then created. He pasted the problem description into the doc. I proceeded to read the doc, but he started to explain the problem to me verbally and gave me an example input and the desired output. I understood what he said so I proceeded to code which I did in my terminal program as I wanted to actually run the code. But then he asked me to paste the code into the Google doc so he could see it. In order to satisfy him, I alternated between my terminal and his doc - edit my code a few, then re-paste the entire thing into the doc. I encountered problem pasting into the doc. It turned out he did not give me write permission, which he then fixed. After a short while I got the code working for his example input/output. He looked at it and immediately added a second example input/output and said that my code does not work for it. I went back to reading the problem description and realized that the first example input/output was just a narrow interpretation of the problem. The second example was in scope. So I proceeded to modify the code, but he told me not to bother as there was not enough time left. He asked me to instead just describe how I would change the code. I promptly answered and he said it was correct.
That was the end of his testing. I had questions prepared and asked what few of them time allowed, and then we ended the interview. Few days later, I received their automated no-reply/thank-you email saying that they "ended up moving forward with another candidate". It's been a week since that email and the job is still listed on their website.
