Be ware - very unprofessional interview experience feeling like providing free work.
Disclaimer: This is my subjective experience and I had suspicions when I did their interview - it cannot be proven but I still wanted to provide data points for readers to decide.
My suspicion: I kept getting the feeling during the interview that I was working free for the interviewer
What happened:
- I was presented a list of 5-6 questions to answer in SQL to pull data as described
- Instead of using a code pad system, the interviewer directly gave me remote control and asked me to write SQL code live in their own system
- The datasets look like real data with customer IDs and descriptions etc, and not 100% clean (there are duplications etc., not like a dataset built for interviews), and the interviewer seemed surprised when I checked and told them some IDs are not unique.
- After I finish one question, the interviewer asked me an unscripted follow-up (what about looking at something in certain way) that were NOT written among the listed questions, while I still had a few more questions to complete
- The questions did not appear to have logical progressions like other companies' (one question building on another), they were entirely unrelated, and also not phrased very precisely. When I asked follow up on what exactly is wanted, the interviewer needed to substantiate the question by typing more into the question
- The interview was slotted for 1 hour, approaching the end while I still hadn't complete all questions, the interviewer said they could stay longer to get the question done
Summary: The remote control on real DB setup and how questions were asked and paced made me feel that the interview questions were data pull requests the interviewer collected and didn't want to spend time writing themselves, so they could use interviews to let candidates perform free work while they evaluated.