STEMCELL Technologies Software Engineer interview questions

I first had a phone interview with the recruiter which went well, and was then 2 weeks later invited for an on-site interview. The on-site interview initially went well until one of the interviewers asked me a question on multithreading. He gave a situation of 4 threads (no specific code), one with lower priority than the others, and simply asked the question, word for word, "what happens to the thread with low priority?" with no other details. I had no idea what he meant by "what happens" and very courteously asked him to clarify. He then drew 4 bars on the whiteboard each representing a single thread (with the lower priority thread being a shorter bar) and simply restated the question "so what happens to this low priority thread?". I can assure you that I've not left out any key information here, this was literally the question posed. My first impression was that he might be asking what happens with regard to which threads get run on the CPU, but this is determined entirely by the OS scheduler and the architecture of the CPU, which he never specified. I tried to give some examples of what could happen, for example the low priority thread could get starved, or it might get switched out more, or it might run fine if there are enough cores, but I never got any vibes that I was on the right track. I then once again stated that I didn't understand exactly what he was asking of me and he said "that's okay, no problem" and just left it there. I had tried to extract more information from him about the problem, but he wasn't working with me and simply just restated the original question. Extremely poor interviewer in my opinion, you don't find quality engineers by asking vague nonsensical questions and then being tight lipped on the details. This led me to feel that maybe I was being thrown under a bus, or maybe he didn't truly understand his own question. Either way, this made for an extremely negative experience. I got a rejection email the next day. The position also demanded 5+ years of experience, but the recruiter on the phone outright told me the salary was in the low $70k range, which is *very* below average for this city even for a new graduate. They justified this by saying "that's just what we pay our other staff". Avoid.

Interview was very frustrating because the recruiter did not know anything about the software job requirements. I had little confidence that the recruiter understood any the requirements for the position itself or how anything on the applicants resume/cover letter related to the position. Maybe a good place for scientist but I have doubts how serious the company values their software and engineering department. Might be trendy to show up to social parties late, but if the applicant is working; maybe it would be advisable to call on time. Advise to management would be to bring on a technical recruiter and offer this recruiter some night school HR courses to work on some tact and professionalism.