Call with recruiter, then general chat with an engineering lead (about my motivations, what I'm looking for, what my background is), then 1 hour pair programming (test driven development). Very collaborative coding experience.

Initial screening with external recruiter. Follow-up conversation with internal recruiter. Live paired technical coding session with an engineer. The early stages were straightforward and professionally handled. Communication from the recruiters was clear, and the process moved at a reasonable pace. However, the live paired coding session was where the experience deteriorated. During the exercise, the engineer introduced suggestions mid-implementation that redirected the approach. Under time pressure, this caused confusion and led the solution down an unproductive path. When I raised that the suggestions had disrupted the flow of the task, the response was that they were “just suggestions” and I did not need to follow them. In a live pairing context, especially during assessment, guidance carries implicit weight. Introducing direction and later distancing from it created an unclear evaluation environment. The experience felt less like collaborative problem-solving and more like being tested on how well I could filter ambiguous input while coding under pressure.