Applied online in late October 2025. Got a screening email within a couple days for a 30-min call with their talent lead. She seemed impressed and pushed me to the next round: a Zoom with a senior engineer. Dude was chill, but the tech questions jumped around like a bad playlist. Basically, their whole stack is just reshaping LLM output data in Go, then slapping it on screen with React + TypeScript. Nothing groundbreaking. Same day, they dropped a take-home assessment and said "half a day max" (which is already too much to ask) – I smashed it out the next day anyway. Early November, invited to their office for in-person chats with the manager and a staff engineer. Walked them through my code + did a mock review... and wow, the blank stares and straight-up wrong questions were next level. When I politely corrected a couple things, you could feel the vibe shift hard. Got the rejection call from the initial recruiter: "You're talented, but not moving forward." I straight-up told her I'd probably dodge that management chain even if they offered. Burned 3 prime weeks job hunting right before Christmas. Total time sink.