A recruiter called first to talk about the position and the company. He then set up an interview with the supposed hiring manager and mentioned that I need to sign an NDA so that the manager can talk about a new proprietary product they are building. He also said that in that one hour interview the first 30 mins the manager will talk about the product and the role and the last 30 mins will be a coding exercise The person who took the interview was far from being a manager. He did not talk one word about the product and straight away jumped into the coding exercise where he asked a couple of lame problems. He clearly did not want to take the interview and seems like somebody forced him to take it. While I was coding this person wasn’t even paying attention. Every time I finished up the coding and asked if it’s fine he then looks into it and says let me check. Which means he was busy on his mobile and not looking at the code. I don’t know if this guy even understood what I coded. The language must have been alien to him. Despite solving the two silly problems successfully and testing it in front of him and giving correct results he went back and rejected. We finished the interview with 15 mins to spare. If he had some expectation about performance or coding style he could have commented it right away. But this guy was not following at all what I had coded. The worst part is these Bay Area junk companies say they are hiring a data engineer position and they don’t ask even one data related question before judging the candidate. There are N number of coding languages in the world and anybody can google on stack overflow and code. What’s the big deal in that. Being able to solve complex data problems with quick thinking and a solid design is the ultimate test. Unfortunately these Bay Area companies who are already suffering with high attrition rates and poor reviews are already struggling and on top they send an unqualified guy to interview a senior candidate. A few dumb algorithms will not prove the worthiness of a candidate and worst part these algorithms will not be used in day to day work. For these companies interviews are a means to filter people and not hire them. It’s all about what the candidate does not know rather than understanding what a candidate knows I have delivered a top class project in production single handedly in the last 3 months. I want to know if this interviewer even has that caliber to deliver stuff let alone judge others. He said they are looking at adding 30 people in one year. What a joke. With such illogical interviews they would be lucky to get 3 people who can even stay with them for a year. Advice for other candidates is to avoid Bay Area start ups which suffer from funding problems, high attrition, constant reorganization, revenue and profitability issues and clarity in hiring process. Despite what they say and claim on the website deep down it’s all a lie and chaotic inside the company.