The red flags began almost immediately after meeting with recruiter, he was a nice guy but it was like, "ok next interview is tomorrow" and I said, "maybe next week" and the response was basically "it's either tomorrow or forget it" and not only was it the next day but it was "we only have this time slot to take it or leave it". I should've walked away at that point but I agreed and asked the recruiter what language the coding would be on or what I should expect but he ignored me and threw me in the deep end. I interviewed with the DevOps manager and an intermediate engineer I guess and it was the most difficult interview I ever had. I like to think that I know how to do my job but the questions they ask are honestly very difficult and all it does is make you feel like an absolute idiot. I don't know why companies do this, I get that you want to hire someone competent but drilling a person with questions expecting them to know the underlying details isn't fair. I would much rather get a take home assignment or be given a terminal to do some tasks but asking how would you do this and that without some visual is very hard. Also, be honest, who doesn't use the internet when solving an issue, how about you provide the engineer all the tools he/she would use to fix the issue. Some of the questions that were asked literally have 1% chance of happening and every answer you gave wasn't good enough, it was almost as if their purpose was to humiliate you and I felt very dumb with every question I answered. I would expect this from Amazon, Google or Mircrosoft but not from a small to medium company. I've had bad experiences in interviews but this one takes the trophy, they don't just want you to know the answer, they wanna know under the hood and you better know how it works. It really felt like the purpose of the interview was to not see how smart you are but how dumb you are. The only hands on task was the coding part where they asked you to write a function to a problem you never had and you were not allowed to use Google to find a library that probably exists.