t's been about 5 months since my interview. i purposefully wanted to sit on for a while to find out how i really felt. i was contacted by a direct recruiter over linkedin. a phone screen with the recruiter, then with the director of the group, then scheduled for an onsite. i was warned it would unorthodox and that they were trying something new. when i arrived, i had a short chat with the director, then it was explained i would be given a laptop, and a problem to solve in about 2 hours. without going into details, the problem went like this, "the netflix mobile app doesn't have feature XXX. we came across an open source app that has feature XXX, but it doesn't compile or otherwise run. can you get it to work?" i was told that no one had ever got the app to work, so just do as much as you can in the allotted time. without going into too many details, i got the app almost 100% working. there were many problems: outdated libraries, broken project setup, and some very, very obscure code bugs related to authentication. i was pretty happy that i succeeded, and the director seemed surprised and impressed as well. we had another short chat about what i had accomplished, then talked about next steps which was presented to me as a done-deal at the time. a few hours later, i get a call from the recruiter. they were passing. no reason given (as is typical of course). now, this could have been completely legit. despite having succeeded technically, i may have rubbed them the wrong way. that seems unlikely though as 95% of the interview was be alone in a room coding. maybe they weren’t truthful about no one ever successfully getting the app to work, and i actually did much more poorly than the average candidate. another possibility is that they brought me in to get some free work done. every one of my colleagues that i discuss this with suggests this. honestly, this seems a little crazy. is it worth the effort to get a few hours of free work when they have an entire staff of highly trained engineers with domain specific knowledge? i’ll never know, but i must say, the entire thing felt strange, and still does. to add to that, i was later referred on linkedin to another employer out of the blue, by the same director.