Step 1: Initial phone call with recruiter as expected. Step 2: Take-home coding challenge. The challenge was to build a form in React, with validation and a nice UI. Time-boxed at 90 min, which wasn't very realistic, but also not really enforced. A good challenge, in that it's very relevant and similar to typical frontend work. Step 3: Technical phone screen. Seemed redundant…I just submitted code, why the need to see more? Format was dumb: an awkward engineer presented the problem via CoderPad, then was completely silent while I solved it (even muting the mic for much of the time). This confrontational style is very off-putting, and made me question if I even wanted to continue if this is representative of their engineering culture. The problem was to write an interpreter to evaluate math in a nonsense format string. I'm not a quick algorithm solver, so it took me a bit, but I came up with a relatively clean solution that solved all test cases. The interviewer then wanted to know the exact time complexity of my solution; given that such exact analysis isn't relevant to most frontend work, I gave the answer of "I don't know, it's not great because there are nested loops, but I'd google it if I needed an exact answer". The interviewer (a backend engineer) didn't like that answer. 🙄 Rejection email came the next day, as expected. I had already mentally written off the company from their outdated, confrontational interview process.