initial phone call, followed by onsite interview.
during 60 mins phone call, interviewer was talking for about 50 minutes mostly telling what is acceptable in the company, what is not acceptable... and if i m not okay i should skip rest. in first 40 mins of phone interview, i was given chance to speak only 3 sentences and was abruptly cut whenever tried to speak to provide details or ask questions. Then i answered questions for about 7-8 mins and again rest of all time again interviewer was speaking :)
at this point - was almost certain it wasn't for me and probably would not accept offer; kept open mind and went for f2f interview, may be i am wrong
in first round it became clear - shallow tech stack, mostly development is done using off-the- shelf cloud products. tech does not seem to demand performance, scaling, threading, or systems knowledge besides what cloud providers guidelines specify, not single question on data structures or on the programming language features
coding assignment involved doing task in very peculiar manner as required by interviewer rather than in best possible way. questions, suggestions, discussions about options were completely banned :) instead of checking analytical or coding skills or personal skills, it seemed points were needed to be scored based on certain specific way of coding. it did not helped that interviewer took 25 minutes (out of 60 mins) of actual task explaining how it must be done in specific 'correct' way, which honestly wasn't the best or even one of better ways of doing task and was not testing clean coding practices or knowledge of language (depth-width)or analytical skills rather just an ability to listen instruction and mechanically churn out code lines.
strong hint of micromanagement, and hierarchical setup
