It's wild to see so many advocates of "the inexperienced should have experience already". You're put in an awful situation but it's your own fault because you went through it, you should have known better than to take questions at face value as presented.

We weren't there, and the article is light on details, so we can only speculate. I see two options here:

a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.

b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.

What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.

They shouldn't ask such questions, but people also need to learn to push back against unreasonable behaviour too.

"How are you?" "How was your weekend?"

It is common for people to ask a personal sounding question but expecting an impersonal answer.

I think this is the case of "hey how it's going." In most cases what is actually being demanded of you is a bullshit answer.

OP took it at face value. I can relate.

Alternatively, the interviewer was a psychopath. (I can also relate!)

This is what makes this a potentially (mostly) great interview. If the candidate can’t/doesn’t understand the dynamic of the interview and hates it, they opt out of the process.

Probably only thing I would’ve done differently would have been to limit first call to 30 minutes to save me time when someone is obviously a bad fit.

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