Round 1: 30 minutes discussion with HR. It was a discussion to learn about my skills and projects put on my resume. Which I had explained it well. She mostly looked for keywords which might have been provided to her. On all, it went well and I was shortlisted for the next round with the head of engineering and a Data Scientist. Round 2: They both explained their expectation for the role and business processes well. And I was confident my profile matched to the foresaid requirements. Unexpectedly, they were more interested to learn how's and what's of my ex-company's processes rather my profile. Which I later thought is because this is a startup and they want to capture this information from the market to implement in their organization. I was told that they were happy to learn about my profile and would share a technical task next. Round 3: Technical task - It was a Time series forecasting task using POSTGRESQL(database). Though this role was for Data Scientist, I am not sure why the task focused more on data engineering activities (extracting data from multiple sources, cleaning and loading it, creating pipeline for the ETL + final prediction, updating pipfile, docker file etc). But since I was good at these too I did not cross-question them. My code was almost production like completely modular, handling errors, with comments for each piece of code, explaining each decision. Created a readme file for all the folders to explain the steps to be followed, analysis and references. After 10 days I received a mail from HR that they had selected another candidate whose results were more detailed and accurate. I am not sure if it is ethical to reject a candidate just because you were expecting more details on the steps. Someone who has dedicated so much time and effort should not she/he be given a chance to explain her/his work if all you were looking for was more detailed explanation. Interviewing for such startups is very demoralizing specially during these COVID times. You are not sure if you should put in your 100% or not. Since most of them are only interested in extracting the knowledge you have and keeping the markets warm by creating openings(for not hiring). This entire process took a month's time.