First received an OA, where there was a series of both multiple choice and programming questions that were not difficult but time was tight.
Then received a normal and standard phone screening
Scheduled the interview. Interview was booked for an extremely long timeslot (4 hours). Upon entering the interview call, there are 2 interviewers, and they greet me in Mandarin chinese. Prior to the interview I have not made any indication that i spoke Mandarin, so they assumed I can speak the language based on my last name alone. I am only conversationally fluent in Mandarin but when it comes to any technical jargon or domain-specific topics, my Mandarin knowledge is extremely lacking. I told them about my limitations in my Mandarin-speaking abilities but disregarded my concern aside (probably since superficially I sound fluent) and continued the interview speaking mandarin.
For like 3/5 of the interview, it was just answering a long series of leetcode questions in C. They explicitly tell you that they don't need you to talk while coding, just told to code up the solution while they observe your coding style. Essentially its a proctored OA where you sit in a call where one of their engineers who watches you work silently. Well it would've been silent had one of the interviewers not have a noisy background. One of the interviewers left very shortly in this phase of the interview.
Once I was done with the gauntlet of leetcode questions, the remaining interviewer ask a series of behvaioural and technical questions. As I mentioned before, since my mandarin is terrible when it comes to technical jargon, I had to request the interviewer to switch the language to english. Overall I think I was a complete cultural mismatch and a very odd interview where I felt dumb for not being able to speak their language of choice to the level I needed.
