My first phone interview was with the director of engineering. She was very polite and professional. She mostly asked leadership and experience questions. I was very impressed with her and was excited to learn more about the company after our conversation.
My second phone interview was with the architect a few days later. He called 30 minutes late. His first “technical question” (as he called it) was a mathematics brain teaser where you have to figure out in your head how many trailing zeros are in 100 factorial. His second “technical question” (as he once again called it) was a role playing exercise where he was a “business user” calling me with urgency about why a url was not working. I found this to be a highly unusual question for this type of interview, but I played along. I attempted to ask a few standard troubleshooting questions about the details of the problem that he was experiencing, but any question that I asked was promptly interrupted with a hostile “I see NOTHING!!!” response. After a few of these, I then told him that if the “business user” was unable to provide any useful details, then I would then proceed to do a bit of troubleshooting myself. His response was that doing any hands on troubleshooting myself was not an option and that he was my “eyes and ears”. I am not entirely sure what answer he was looking for, but at this point I became tired of his behavior so I ended the interview and told him that I was no longer interested in the position.
