First round with HR went very well. No surprises — a short call to learn more about the position and to share some information about myself. A typical flow: personal background, motivation, career path & projects, as well as soft skills & collaboration style. I already received confirmation for the next round during the conversation. When I asked how that would look, I was told there definitely wouldn’t be a live coding session — that’s not something they do — but rather a technical discussion, something along the lines of system design. The second meeting with two engineers from the team started as expected: a brief introduction, a system design interview, and some additional questions about transformer architectures, for example. Up to that point, everything was fine — but in the second half, they brought up a LeetCode-style task and asked me to solve it live. First, my recommendation: with questions like that, you definitely won’t find the right engineers for your team, only people who have specifically prepared for this — basically, those who have memorized LeetCode problems. Second, it’s unacceptable to say one thing and then do another. That leaves a very poor impression. In the future, HR and the recruiting team need to align beforehand on exactly what the interview process should look like. Anything else is disrespectful to the candidate who takes the time to present themselves to the company (often multiple times).