It was just discussing about the role and my fit. I was informed about the interview process and the hybrid work culture they had. There was a coding test before the interview which had 2 questions that were fairly simple. Then there was the 1st round of interview.

I've been approached by the recruiter, who scheduled a phone screen. At the phone screen the interviewer was completely clueless about data engineering at all. I had to explain him what is Record Layout, Data Enhancement, Hash Totals etc. Afterwards, he came up with 3 lines of Java code that overwrites random values in the list and asked me how I would revert it back. I explained, that in real life we have some integrity checks that will detect violation of data integrity and reject such records, rather than trying to "fix" them. Additionally, when I said that during an initial discussion with recruiter I stressed that I'm not Java developer. The interviewer said that Java is same Scala. When I asked what similarities he could see between these two languages, he could not tell much. I pointed out, that Scala mostly uses immutable data structures, so his Java example is irrelevant, since you cannot overwrite immutable value. Such a waste of time. I wish companies had less clueless monkeys, who memorize recycled knowledge and try to look smart.