First off, the interviewer was 30 minutes late. The scheduled time was already inconvenient, and then he pulls this on top of it.
He started by going over my resume, and we talked for over half an hour. The interviewer was obviously distracted the whole time, kept asking me to re-explain things I had already explained, and wasted a lot of time going back and forth like that.
Then out of nowhere he hit me with a system design question — how would you design a newsfeed, straight verbal, no whiteboard. It was pretty obvious the interviewer just wanted to find something to pick at, kept saying "anything else? anything else?"
Finally at the end he threw in an algorithm question: find the number that appears exactly once in a sorted array. This is where it really got good. The best solution to this problem is binary search, but the interviewer said he didn't like that my while loop had three branches, and that there was a cleaner way to write it. So I spent the rest of the interview debugging his "cleaner" version of the code until time ran out.
All I can say is, when you run into a company and an interviewer like this, it's better to just end the interview early.
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