The interview could benefit from a more structured approach. The introduction felt abrupt, and there were communication challenges due to the interviewer’s accent, which made it difficult to fully engage. During the coding round, I was asked to jump straight into the code without explaining my thought process, which left me unsure if my earlier responses had influenced this. It felt like there was little room to showcase my problem-solving abilities. Additionally, limited time was available at the end to ask about the role or team, and the responses I received were quite blunt.

My interviewer showed up on time on the video call, and we started with a problem on a coding site I had never used before. It was pretty clunky. He was interviewing me from China, night for me over in California. I confirmed with him that I understood the problem, but there were lots of gotchas with the half-assembled coding environment that made debugging hard. A lot of time was spent talking out my solution, and we're getting toward the end of the interview, and he reveals to me that I'm solving the wrong problem. At first I hadn't even seen the problem description, and when I did, I just glanced at it really quick, and confirmed with him that I understood it. 40 minutes into the interview, I realize that I was doing the wrong problem. Every time I asked him if I understood it correctly, he said "yes". I quickly threw something together that looked good to me and him, but not the right answer. After being on the call for over an hour I called it. Apparently he's an Android developer who doesn't know Kotlin at all, so my code was foreign to him. No Android questions, nothing to do with my day-to-day as an Android developer, no Kotlin, just an algorithms question that wasn't even communicated. If I had slowed down, ignored everything he said, and just read and reread the prompt, I'd be in better shape. He was a really nice interviewer; I felt like he was in my corner. But he does not have enough English experience to truly answer any question in an interview. Because of this, I kept trying to understand him, and he would try to answer again, but I never really understood what he was saying. From the other Glassdoor interview reviews here, I had heard it was a bad experience. And it was bad, but I knew they didn't have it together going in to it, so it wasn't a letdown when it was a disaster. I was expecting it, but still wanted to put my best foot forward, as everyone's experience is unique. The experience was a valuable one, and it showed me how little TikTok cares.