I got the interview through a referral. The recruiter emphasized that it's pair programming and that using AI is very much encouraged. It's 75 minutes, and at the start the interviewer shares a repo with the problem statement and the actual questions in it.
The problem was to write an auto refund system based on the requirements. It's not LeetCode style, more like a mix of mini system design + coding. There are multiple small questions, and I don't know exactly how many. I wasted a lot of time setting up git at the beginning, then rushed like crazy after that and finished 3 questions. There were still 10 minutes left and I actually could have kept going on the next question, but the whole time the interviewer kept stressing "Oh, you don't have to finish all of them, how many you get through doesn't matter, what matters is how you do it, blah blah blah," so he just switched straight to Q&A.
The questions weren't hard, pretty easy to understand. I used JetBrains + Claude Code, and writing the solution was pretty easy. During the interview I was also discussing things with the interviewer the whole time, like why I designed it this way, and I clarified a lot of edge cases, that kind of thing. The interviewer seemed like a really nice guy and kept saying things like "Oh, great that you brought that up" and "This design is really good." Who would have thought that the very next day I'd be told I failed.
I'm pretty down about it. I asked the recruiter for feedback and got a bunch of nonsense. I have no idea what their hiring bar actually is. Anyway, it felt pretty good while I was interviewing, and then right after, I got hit over the head!
I hadn't really seen a similar question on the forum before, so I'm posting to contribute a data point. And while I'm at it, I really have to vent about what a smiling assassin the interviewer was.
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