The two interviews I had with this company were bizarre and made me feel quite unsettled. The recruiter called me out of the blue, which isn't ideal -- 99% of recruiter screenings I do are scheduled ahead of time and I think that's the right way to do it. But I went ahead and scheduled the hiring manager interview anyway. The screening felt odd, though, which foreshadowed what was to come next.
I initially suspected the hiring manager to be a robot, because he exhibited zero emotion and had the personality of a mop. In fact, ChatGPT might be more personable than this individual was. He started the interview with his camera off, which supported my theory that he was some kind of primitive AI language model.
He immediately jumped into probably the most poorly-worded technical question I've ever been asked--some convoluted variation on a block sliding down a ramp. While I was working through it, he suddenly turned his camera on and stared into my soul, which admittedly threw me off a little. There was no response or feedback on my answer to the question.
At this point, I realized this wasn't an interview, but rather an interrogation. I don't remember a lot of the specifics because of how surreal it all was. At some point, he suddenly turned his camera off again, and then made a pretty ignorant and insensitive remark about my previous employer, which was very upsetting. He asked me if I would invest in that company if I were an investor, which was a very interesting question for a mechanical design engineer interview.
I never heard back, and I thought about reaching out to the recruiter for an update, but decided against it. In fact, I hope they don't reach out to me again. I'm now a little frightened by NEXtracker and their AI hiring managers.