Thank you for the feedback! We'll ensure that our technical interviewers spend a few minutes saying hello before we jump into the kata moving forward. We get that it could be a little overwhelming to dive straight in. In defense of the spirit of the kata: In the decade plus that we've been building software, the number of times we have walked into a situation where we don't have to read lousy code and devise a plan to fix it pretty much zero. The kata we run our potential EMs through is the same kata we run all our engineers through. The goal is to understand how the individual reacts to and cleans up poor designs (leave the campground cleaner than you found it), break a problem into smaller pieces (divide and conquer), and how they quickly reason about a codebase they've never seen. We have interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of folks, and we have overwhelmingly positive reviews on our process. Ultimately, we're not thrilled this candidate had a bad experience, and we'll work on way to make it better as a result. We wish them the best of luck.