Zillow Software Engineer interview experience

I spoke with a recruiter by phone about my background and experience, and then I was invited to a technical interview.

The assessment was framed as collaborative and meant to feel more like a real-world problem rather than a LeetCode-style exercise. But once I got into the interview, it didn’t really match that expectation. The interviewer also seemed disengaged—there was a lot of silence during the conversation—and at one point they admitted they weren’t even sure what language I was using to solve the task, even though I was completing it in Java.

What threw me off most was how little