Interviewed for an Engineering Manager position and completed two rounds. The first round was excellent. The interviewer asked detailed technical and architecture questions, challenged my decisions with follow-up questions, and maintained a professional and respectful discussion throughout. Regardless of the outcome, I found that round valuable. My experience in the second round was different. I felt the discussion became more focused on defending organizational decisions from my previous company rather than understanding my reasoning and leadership approach. For example, when discussing engineering quality, I explained that I had proposed introducing SonarQube, but the proposal wasn't approved by the architecture team. Instead, I implemented alternative quality improvements within my team's control, including stronger CI quality gates, mandatory PR reviews, and AI-assisted code review agents. I felt these alternatives were not explored in depth. The job description also emphasized AI, and I expected a deeper discussion around practical AI adoption in engineering, governance, and developer productivity. In my experience, that topic was only touched on briefly. My only suggestion is to provide candidates with specific, actionable feedback after the interview. Even a few points on areas for improvement would make the interview experience much more valuable.