I had an initial screening call with an internal recruiter. The screening call was over video conferencing, it was very swift and the recruiter did not even turn their camera on, and they launched straight into talking really fast without any introductions or niceties, so I didn't even have a chance to highlight that they camera was off. So I was speaking to a picture of a Pokémon for 30 minutes which was a bit awkward. They also didn't ask me any questions about myself or my experience, so really the call was more to give me information rather than an interview. At the end of the call I was told I would be sent a HackerRank test to complete before proceeding to the next rounds. The HackerRank test was completely impossible. The time limit given was extremely unrealistic especially as you are not allowed to search outside of the test platform. This is not reflective of the skills required or how we approach the job, especially in 2026 where every engineer uses AI. The IDE gives some hints for functions, but the exercises required usage of libraries so not allowing search for documentation is ridiculous, you can't expect candidates to have memories libraries (I had never even used this one before). Also one of the questions was to build a whole React feature in 30 minutes, and the test platform spun up a WHOLE APP, and the feature itself was hidden behind auth. So I had to create a fake account on this fake app, so I used an insecure password, my Chrome extension alerted me to the weak password, and then HackerRank said I was going to flagged for cheating because I "left the browser window". Honestly it was so ridiculous it became funny. Naturally I did not pass the HackerRank stage! It showed me that the company is inexperienced in hiring engineers.