The interview process was extremely disjointed, with almost no continuity from one round to the next. I went through a total of six rounds, including two coding challenges (yes, two). I aced both coding challenges. One of them required building a full OpenID Connect (OIDC) provider with a centralized authentication/SSO server that other applications could use for login, an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server that issues tokens to client applications after user authorization, and an Identity Provider (IdP) that manages user identities, registration, login, and profile data. This wasn’t a toy exercise, it had to be a production-ready authentication service, complete with AWS deployment scripts using Terraform. I got everything working end-to-end, with unit tests and documentation within 4 hours. I performed well in the first two interviews. The third interview was a system design interview, which is where things started to get strange. The interviewer didn’t seem to understand the scope of the project they themselves had selected, which made it nearly impossible to answer any meaningful probing questions. The questions were EXTREMELY vague...so vague that you start questioning whether you’re mentally incapable of understanding the context. However, it’s not you; the questions are simply very poorly framed and poorly designed. They rely on overly abstract concepts that make you want to punch a baby. The real goal is clearly to see how you perform under pressure. For example, one question involved a client with thousands of data sources, an ontology, and a desire to build AI that automatically maps all disparate data sources to that ontology. Fine, that’s a reasonable starting point. But then the interviewer simply asked, "what are your next steps." Naturally, I began asking clarifying questions. Each time, the response was, "that's all that is given to you." Repeatedly. The scenario was completely unrealistic. Internally, I was thinking, “I just wouldn’t take on this client given the sample size and lack of requirements,” but this is a technical interview, you’re not supposed to reject the client outright. As it turns out, that was the correct answer, even though that decision is typically made at a very different stage of the funnel. If that's what their Staff Engineers are doing, then something is fundamentally wrong. That realization made everything click. This company appears to be a volume shop: they take on hundreds of small, vaguely defined POCs, in short periods of time and have people use AI to work on them for a few days, attempt to solve the problem quickly, and if it fails, they simply pass on the client. It feels like a boiler room of people vibe-coding low-quality solutions at scale in hopes of landing contracts. No bueno.