short conversation with recruiter. Was super casual, just asked about my experience, my reasons for looking for a new job, etc. Heard back a few days later regarding setting up a phone screen with a manager. was asked some javascript trivia questions: all of my javascript knowledge was from on the job experience and there were definitely some theoretical questions I wasn't aware of. I wish I knew what kind of questions to expect since tech interviews are very much like a mix of an exam and an actual interview. I thought that interview went horribly since I could only answer about half of those questions. If you took formal classes in JavaScript, then I'd imagine these kinds of questions would be very easy. I heard back the following week regarding setting up a final interview on Google meet. This was a complete shock to me as i couldn't answer a lot of those trivia questions. I tried emailing the recruiter I was in contact with about what to expect, but all i got as a response was a confirmation that my interviews were confirmed and a good luck... then came the final interview: was 3 hours, there seemed to be different people I interviewed with than the names listed on the confirmation email. this isn't a red flag by any means, but I definitely like to prepare questions specific for people based on their linkedin profiles. Overall, I was expecting the final interview rounds to be standard white boarding questions, but was caught off guard with trivia questions. I won't blatantly list everything they asked, but the rounds were something like: 1. a bunch of trivia questions surrounding React and some JavaScript questions. All of my front end knowledge is purely from my work experience. Thus, these are either questions you know or you don't know. At the end, I got thrown into a live coding session with making a straight forward React component for keeping track of a counter. was then sent another live coding session where they asked a pure javascript question: what i mean by pure is no JS frameworks or anything. I haven't done anything like this in years, so I explained by words what my game plan was since I was struggling a bit and since they wanted a hard cut of to save 5 minutes for asking questions. They threw this second live coding question at me with 10 minutes remaining and we cut when we hit 5 minutes remaining. 2. A lot of theoretical questions on how things work under the hood. CSS related, HTML related, some JavaScript libraries' related, specific to how the web works. I got blatantly called out for not knowing about responsive design with using em units, but I mean you can still make things responsive without using em units if you just use media queries.... some of these questions were open ended, but they were looking for very specific answers and seemed disappointed. Then got asked some really random and weird questions like: name some sorting algorithms. 3. luckily this round was a completely behavioral round: I gave examples to my current job and we drew comparisons about how things work at iHerb vs how I currently operate. I can't stress enough how much its important for candidates to be aware of what to prepare. This is a definitive example of when somebody says that tech interviews are just like a mix of an exam and an interview. I was under the impression that I would've been asked standard whiteboarding algorithms questions like most companies and was completely thrown off with the countless theoretical questions I got asked. Ive never been a fan of these trivia style interviews as most places, especially for junior roles, usually ask some sort of white boarding / coderpad question. I find these trivia style interview questions are more appropriate for more mid level/senior level engineers. I made it clear my experience has purely been practical on the job experience for JavaScript: not knowing all of these arbitrary JavaScript terms hasn't hindered my ability to be productive at my current job. Nevertheless, I don't expect to getting an offer as I'd imagine the multiple "I don't knows" were a definite red flag. I ultimately think iHerb is still a great place to work at. However, I just wish I was told what to expect as again, tech interviews are very much like a mix of an exam and an interview.