I was notified that Uber was hiring software developers through the head of student outcomes at the coding bootcamp I attended. I submitted my resume to a specific recruiter at Uber and within the week we had a short phone conversation / HR screen. The language barrier was not prohibitive to our mutual understanding, but English was certainly not the recruiter's first language. I can't explain her decision to submit my resume to the 'mobile development team' even though I am a web developer with no mobile programming experience, other than maybe that is where they needed the most hiring at the time. I can't help but wonder whether the outcome may have been different had I insisted on being considered for a web developer role. Anyways, I was scheduled for a technical phone screen about a week after the first phone call, and it was conducted by a lead engineer on one of the mobile platform teams. Once again, there was a language barrier but this time pretty severe. I had to request that he call from a different number due to the connection quality which, combined with his thick accent made it impossible for me to understand. It ended up taking about 10 minutes to actually begin the interview, and I had to just deal with a poor connection because the interviewer had no access to a room WITH A PHONE/LANDLINE! He was using google hangouts to call, as was I, even though I asked if he could call me from another phone or call my cell phone directly, he ended up calling me back from the same computer on the same number. With no other choices, we started the interview.. It took five minutes and several requests to spell the words he was using in order to understand his question. Often times, questions or comments I made were met with silence or "yes", "i see" and other monosyllabic non sequiturs that are the awkward refuge for a foreign speaker pretending to converse (i know because i have been that foreigner speaker myself). I also remember several times having to ask if he was still on the phone due to long periods of silence while I was working on the problem he gave me. Even though the first fifteen to twenty minutes of the conversation were wasted with connectivity/mutual comprehension issues, once we got to within five minutes of an hour from the scheduled starting time, he asked me to quickly explain how I would finish the problem and thanked me for trying. Needless to say I did not quite finish solving the problem , but even if I had been given that extra five minutes at the end , I might have been able to finish.