The interview with the techincal manager was a really good experience and he offered to explain all the details about the position, the hiring process and anything else I would like to know. He was exceptionally polite and generous.
However the next part was a technical assignment to do at home which was anything but trivial. You were given something like 5 days. These tasks were full blown projects. Not only you were to develop code but also documentantion and scripts to make it run easy. Now what "easy" means they didn't define so you could only assume a non technical person; it was a lot of work.
It had 3 different parts, of which you were expected to deliver the 2. But then they would go into details and explain things like "if you don't have time to do a 2nd one at least provide some idea of how it would be done" (in what format?) but also, at the same time mention things like stretch goals. So it was totally arbitrary how much of it you need to deliver. You could deliver all three if you could and that would be a stretch goal, even more "bonus points" for you. I 've complete after enough effort one of them and tried to start the 2nd but all this made me thinking how is supposed a person with full-time job supposed to do all that... (I was unemployed at that time). And then the fact that these projects were exactly like the tasks they have told you about they are doing on a daily basis, making it all look like they were looking for free work, or free improvements of what they were doing already. Either that, or they were trying to demoralize you, for the fact that you wouldn't be able to deliver everything, thus you should lower you salary expectations. At the end I got fed up and canceled my application, didn't deliver anything to them, as I wouldn't want to provide free labor. The only other thing I can think of is that they were expecting you to use AI in order to deliver all this in time. But they should had communicated that clearly if that was the case.
