I had an interview for a software engineer role. The HR was proactive, quickly arranging and scheduling the interview with one person as mentioned in the prep email. "Preparation is key for competency-based questions: You will be asked a question regarding some of our values and behaviours which we recommend you answer with specific examples of how you have demonstrated these qualities, ideally in a relevant business example to this role." I prepared examples for competency-based questions, but none were asked during the interview, which is fine as interview was for Software engineer. The interview started on time, but instead of one person, two interviewers showed up, which was fine. They didn’t introduce themselves and jumped straight into asking me to give a brief summary of myself. After my introduction, they asked if I had a development setup on my computer. Since the role was Java-based, I mentioned I had IntelliJ set up. I opened IntelliJ and shared my screen. One interviewer pasted a partial problem statement into the Teams call. I quickly realized it was a simple problem and coded a solution in 1-2 minutes. However, the second interviewer got confused about the output, not realizing the first interviewer had only provided part of the problem. The first interviewer then verbally explained what else needed to be done, and I completed it. They then asked 1 or 2 general questions, like if I knew about Kafka. Next, the second interviewer presented a database modeling problem. It was straightforward, so I asked if I should code it or just explain. She asked me to code. While I was coding, the first interviewer interrupted to ask if I had headphones because my Mac keyboard was apparently bothering him. It was an unusual situation. Finally, they wrapped up the interview with a few follow-up questions. I later reached out to the recruiter for feedback and received a response. "(Me) started the interview well, demonstrating good communication skills and a friendly personality. In the coding section, he performed adequately but relied heavily on tools, which resulted in a longer completion time compared to other candidates. Overall, other applicants were stronger in comparison. Me could benefit from refining his knowledge of Java and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)." It was mentioned that I heavily relied on tools. This confuses me because the interviewer specifically asked me to open a development tool to complete the challenge. So how could I have been relying too much on tools when it was a part of the process? There was also a comment about the time it took me to complete the task—just two minutes. Was that considered too long? I don’t understand how that could be seen as an issue. The feedback mentioned that I could benefit from refining my knowledge of Java and Object-Oriented Programming. I’ve been programming since long and didn’t struggle to answer any of the questions. In fact, it seemed the interviewer was confused by the correct solution, which delayed things as she took time to understand it. Overall, this was a very unfortunate and unfair interview experience.