I spoke with a recruiter who then scheduled a meet and greet interview with the hiring manager. The hiring manager interview started off ok, but when down hill quickly. Reflecting on the start of the interview, the moment I said I was learning Typescript, but was not an expert yet, he treated it like I had no experience in the language as all. To add to the dysfunction, he apparently thought it was a technical interview, and launched into the explanation of the problem. When I said that's not what I was told the interview was, he seem to imply that I missed an email or communication explaining the process. Hoping that showing some initiative would be positive, I said I'm fine with going technical so we did.
I am neuro-divergent, so I have learned to take time to fully understand the problem, and the existing code I will be working in, before writing anything. That apparently wasn't fast enough for him, and I think he just assumed I didn't know what I was looking at, so he ask me to pseudocode it. Trying to follow his instructions, I started writing out comments explaining the logic I would implement, and to be fair missed that one type property was defined as Map instead of an array. He asked me what hashmap was, so I explained it, and mentioned that PHP arrays are implemented partially as hashmaps under the hood in the C code. He chuckled and said "I shouldn't use PHP arrays as examples of hashmaps"??? Sure the interface in PHP doesn't present as a hashmap, but that doesn't change how it works. Of course it you really want to explicitly use Maps, Sets, Queues, or other more complex data structures, just include the Ds module. I digress. Again, on reflection, the interview was over in his mind.
It doesn't feel good being written of so early in the process based on a misunderstanding of my level of knowledge, and how I personally work as a software engineer.
