Interviewed for a senior golang backend developer position, short term contract. Got task to do at home, which would be presented and new features added in a live coding session of 45min. For the task I've had a job to do an input parser, validate and produce result based on variable input elements. I've completed the task with all the edge cases covering, and unit test covering. During live call I had a challenge to accommodate code to accept number like a word instead of a literal number, which I've successfully coded with some extra time left. Negative response after a couple of days, which is I think complete BS and lack of engineering feeling - more like an automated corporate BS. Examples: "interviewer expected if-elseif statements in code, but candidate used switch" "interviewer expected usage of assert library for unit tests, but candidate used testing library" "candidate first wrote dictionary key for a given live task as a pure string, and only after a few minutes said better way would be to put it as a constant to avoid mistyping it somewhere else but reuse constant - interviewer expected that to be constant from the start" etc I find that stupid and such a BS, because we are humans and not robots - and it is a completely normal thing that a certain problem has multiple valid approaches, not only what "interviewer exactly expected and has pre-written down"

It took me near 3 weeks to get initial interview. And 1 week to get a response after. They are not looking at CVs, experience, skills and judging solely based on leetcode's like easy questions. So you can struggle a bit and got rejected at the end, no matter who you are.