Got contacted by a recruiter to apply for a software developer position. Went through a phone interview and two rounds of in person interviews. The first round was great, the interviewer asked relevant questions to establish a basic competency level (algorithms and architecture design) I was asked to write some simple programs in C using vi. The interviewer was polite and friendly. In the second round, the interviewer was nit picky and wanted me to give out answers using exactly the words and phrases he was expecting. He asked some obscure questions which were supposed to be regarding the C language in general but were actually specific to the compiler and environment on his computer. Case in point, he showed me some abnormal behaviour in his program and asked me to explain it, I politely replied that the behaviour is undefined by the C standard under those circumstances ( I went home and double checked ). He asked me to explain it regardless, and I said I would probably be able to do it in a known environment if I could look at the low level machine instructions. He did not ask me anything about my many years of experience in designing software solutions and frameworks. I wasn't asked any design related questions as some of the other applicants did. Usually companies will send out a code test to work on at home or on site, which should be sufficient to assess a person's technical abilities. The interview was scheduled for an hour but started 10 minutes late, leaving only 50 minutes for a round 3 interview. At the end he commented that we only hire "very good" coders which might have been a bit unprofessional for someone in a senior role. Overall I would question the interviewer's ability to correctly guage potential employees based on the type of questions he asked.