Initial 45m talk with a senior engineer followed by a take home exercise. I would also like to echo a lot of the negative experience comments. The task per se was quite easy: an LLM-based conversational agent over some financial data. As instructed, it should take a few hours, solution should not be complicated, and also they stated that not all ideas need to be implemented. After all, they instructed to spend 25% of time on writing a report that included solution description, 'Future work' and Error analysis. Putting everything together to have a well structured code, run small scale eval to analyse results, do prompt improvements, re-run eval, and conclude with detailed report easily adds up to a few hours. However, the feedback seemed to imply that far more were expected than either necessary for this problem (LLMs+tools or Agentic style solution), or requested in the description or could be finished in a few hours. The feedback also implied using CoT which was again unnecessary for the complexity of the problem and which I also described in detail in the Future work section, but apparently it was ignored. Other negative aspects: - It is the first time I am asked to use LLMs for home exercise and they don't provide with a temp api_key. - In their orig. instructions email, they mentioned it would be possible that I send them one of my projects as opposed to doing the exercise. However, when I offered to opensource a project of mine that included RAG, LLMs, prompting, they declined. In retrospect it seems clear they want you to work on their problem.