During my first challenging coding interview, I was asked to implement a unit conversion tool. It was fairly easy, and I delivered the solution perfectly. When asked to provide a generic solution for multiple metrics, I suggested using an object because there are not many metrics, and it would perform efficiently as it's almost instant. The interviewer didn't agree or disagree.
During the interview, he also mentioned that he was promoted to engineering manager solely because the last team member left, leaving his team with only himself. This is a red flag because promotions shouldn’t be based just on being the last in a team. He also lacks experience interviewing engineers. He felted disengaged during the whole interview.
I received the rejection email the next day, which surprised me. I feel like my time was wasted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement the metric conversation tool in Javascript
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Ontra in Feb 2026
Interview
Recruiter call followed by an odd hiring manager interview where half the time was spent on behavioral questions and the other half spent on building unit converter in javascript. Next round was a "system design" round and was told in email via the recruiter the problem would involve integrating an LLM into the solution. Spent a week studying and practicing system design problems with LLMs. I join the interview and it turns out it has nothing to do with LLMs, they just asked me to build a recipe app data schema and design the API. The interviewers seemed to like my solution but then I receive a rejection email so generic that it was picked up by my spam folder. Huge waste of time.