[ritchiea]

I had a similar experience with a well known bay area company. I was interviewing for a front end job and they gave me a live coding interview with a recursion question about assembling trees from strings (or maybe vice versa).

I had spent the majority of my time preparing for the interview preparing for front end stuff. I stuffed my brain with Javascript quirks and made sure that the stuff I already knew I could articulate really well. And I gave myself a quirk algorithms review because I knew that is something the Bay Area values.

I struggled with the first question. They asked me if I was interested in a non-dev job because apparently they liked my personality and thought I may be a good cultural fit. It struck me as odd that they liked me enough to inquire if I'm interested in other positions, but only gave me one chance to show them I could be a frontend candidate and the sole interview question wasn't even frontend oriented.