First off, my overall interview experience with Figma was really good — the HR/recruiter was responsive and helpful throughout the whole process, and after the onsite they gave me detailed feedback. Every interviewer I got, except for the one I'm about to go into detail about, was pretty nice.
This interviewer had me for the system design round, and the question was the classic "trending articles" one that shows up a lot in interview reports. In the first ten minutes, during the clarifying / problem-statement phase, I already felt something was really off — the communication just wasn't smooth at all. For every question I asked, this guy wouldn't give me a straight answer and was unwilling to provide any additional information. For example, I'd ask what the raw data looks like, or how we should define "trending" — is it A, is it B, or something else — and he'd just throw it back at me: what do you think it should be? Okay, fine, no problem — so I laid out 2-3 options / possible product designs, with the pros and cons of each, and which one I thought made more sense. At that point, a normal interviewer would give you a clear response — either "let's go with your approach" or "I don't agree with your design" along with a reason. This guy just refused to engage at all. He wouldn't even let me pin down the functional requirements clearly — how am I supposed to move forward from there?
What was even more frustrating was that later, during the high-level design and deep-dive parts, he was clearly doing something else and not listening at all. It happened multiple times — I'd finish explaining how I designed something, along with the other options I'd considered and the trade-offs or pros/cons, and then he'd ask "how would you design this part," not because he wanted me to explain further or clarify, and not because he thought my answer was wrong — it was obvious he just hadn't been listening. This happened at least two or three times.
In the end, when the recruiter/HR gave me feedback, they specifically said this round had a fair amount of negative feedback — e.g. "not able to give clear responses on what technology to choose," etc. — none of which was true. I told HR about this whole pattern of behavior from the interviewer during the interview, and HR said they'd pass my feedback along to the interviewer's manager and the hiring manager (hopefully that's actually true).
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