There's a standard screening call with the recruiter to be sure you're a human being (in this case, the recruiter reached out to me -- cold call).
Next, there was a portfolio review (which they also call a phone screen) for an hour. This was strange because the person interviewing me had no connection to the area I was interviewing for, and was also significantly less experienced than me. He was nice, but managed to bring up the fact that Meta has gotten a lot of negative press recently twice during the call, and when I asked him what excites him most about his job, he said "the people." He'd recently been moved to a less exciting part of the company (ads billing or something) and sounded less than thrilled. Overall it was easy to surmise that moral is low there right now. Must be all of that masculine energy we've been hearing so much about.
Interviewing with someone who has less experience than you is always interesting, but when it's a significant difference, it leads to an entirely different conversation than you might otherwise have had with someone who is more senior. I could tell he was checking questions off a list, listening intently for me to volunteer my role on projects, paying attention to the process story and case study.
I'm a programmer and a designer. I design and build things. AI things, Advanced apps that use computer vision, voice, multimodal input, RAG pipelines, NLP, etc. I know what I'm doing, and I'm good at it. This kid built... ledgers or something. We were galactically differently qualified, and I feel a little cheated by having had him as my interviewer.
It was extremely disappointing overall. Short of Zuck buying my company, I'm done with them. Not worth it, and they can't afford the arrogance anymore.
