Got an intro call with a recruiter, usual corporate stuff, not very interesting as a conversation. Then they took a week to tell me I'd be advancing into the first technical test (the process has at least 4 of these, including take home test, system design, "pairing"). It was focused on algorithms and they gave me study material for it (youtube/leetcode). The call started with ~20 minutes of one of the engineers asking questions from a script, it felt quite pushy, like trying to make me prove that I really had the experience I mentioned. Then moved onto the coding part. The test was a live coding interview using Coderpad with 2 engineers. One of them was silent for most of the call, the other one didn't actually help a lot. First problem was easy, I did it the "dumb" way first then improved it into something "smarter". I took a lot of time to explain my reasoning and thought process. I was happy when I made it work. At no point did I get lost or have to re-do work, some typos or missing return statements happened but I fixed them on the spot. This really felt like a success. Then out of nowhere, having less than 20 minutes left in the call they brought up another problem, a bit more difficult (it included a tree data structure and recursion). I had to rush to get it done, didn't get enough time to think about it and had to jump straigh into implementation. I was nervous, tired and eventually got blocked. I asked for help and one of the engineers (the one who was speaking) tried to help me but I feel he gave me a false hint? and that took me further away from my initial idea (which was the correct approach). They stopped me at 5 minutes left for the call, I couldn't really reach a working solution but the guy said I "was close" (I wasn't close, after the detour cause by his "hint"). Finally they asked for my questions but it all felt very impersonal so I didn't care much. The recruiter then took 6 days to come back to me and said they'd decided not to continue. To be honest I feel like dropping someone because they can't solve an surprise recursion problem is not the best of approaches for finding good candidate. These are all long-solved problems, knowing the solution says nothing about the quality of a candidate or what they can bring to the team. A real shame, but probably a place I wouldn't want to work for anyway.