They reached out to me on LinkedIn, then I had an initial conversation with the recruiter. After that we moved to a live coding session and god, that was awful. One of the worst processes I have ever gone through in my career. The interviewer won't interact with you, but they are expecting you to interact with them??? As someone said here, don't trust them about they using the exercise just to understand how you think. They really expect you to finish the challenge. Which is simple, but ridiculous given the time you have. If you want to use an AI agent, go ahead, I understood it was allowed. I didn't. However, during the whole process I let them know what I was thinking, what I would do in a go-to production scenario, how I would test, the concerns I had, why I was skipping some parts because of time, etc. The whole time. But I still got some negative subjective feedback. They don't want a good engineer, they want a code delivery machine. I can only imagine how many great engineers they let go because of that.

After speaking with the recruiter, I had a coding test that was frustrating. Despite being a pair programming session, the interviewers were mostly silent and offered no feedback. I ended up leading the session and double-checking with them constantly, as they seemed uninterested. The assignment itself was poorly written and unclear, making it hard to understand the expected result. Overall, it felt unproductive and killed any desire to continue the process with this company.