One adtech company I applied to ~10 years ago (Chango - doesn't exist anymore) also put me through the strangest interview I ever had. It was for an SRE role.
There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.
I've had something similar happen but I was actually hired. One of the rounds was with a super senior CTO-like type, and they questioned me about low level details of building Linux CLI tools, which is something I've never done or really didn't know anything about.
I think the idea was to pick an area the interviewer was super familiar with, and see how you can handle stress, can you say "I don't know", can you make some guesses even in the space you are not familiar with and so on. Is it the most effective way of doing interviews? Probably not. But it's not a terrible screen either for common pitfalls with senior engineers.
There was a fairly standard phone screening interview, but then when I went in-person the CTO, VP of engineering, and somebody else I can't recall made the whole interview about torrents and USENET feeds for TV shows. Not a single serious discussion was had about the business or technology, despite my attempts to bring it up. I left scratching my head and a follow-up email that said "they were going to go in a different direction".
I can only guess that the role was going to somebody else they really wanted, but they needed a "competitive" alternative. I was annoyed that they wasted my time, though.