I applied for roles in the Infrastructure team which requires strong AWS, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, automation, continuous integration and deployment (CICD) skills, yet my technical interview did not explore any of these skills at all. In fact it solely focused on one specific programming language that was not my "expertise".
At the start of the interview, both interviewers didn't even bother introducing themselves to me or what their roles were. I had to ask them 5 mins in just as we were about to the start the coding exercise. Another thing to point out is that they were seated in a long meeting room on one end with the camera on the other end so I could barely see their faces. At times it was also hard to hear them (they must of been far away from the microphone too).
The interview process in general is very similar to the top tech companies from the Silicon Valley except it was run by people who are a lot less professional. After going through this process, it made me think that perhaps all the negative reviews previously were true about “your status becomes higher or more valued the longer you are an employee, and new starters are seen as outsiders”.