This was a total waste of time. I had an initial phone screening with a recruiter, which was typical of tech interviews. The recruiter had a list of basic questions to ask and keywords to hear and check off. Then I had a one-on-one technical interview with a principal data architect on the team. He didn't turn on his camera and gave some excuse about having issues with Teams. We started with basic introductions, my background, and the job role, after which we started a HackerRank session. But in between, he said he needed some time to set it up, during which he let me ask some questions about him, the team, and the role. It took ~10 min for him to set up the HackerRank and it looked like he spent that time Googling around to find a halfway-decent question. He had pasted this into the HackerRank code section as a comment block and even thoughtfully left the message "this question may be modified for different companies and different roles" at the end. The question itself was also totally useless in the HackerRank setting as it asked me to write a Python script that read messages from a Kafka stream and write them to a SQL database. The inputs for this script were supposed to come from CLI arguments and include Kafka and DB config variables. I said I would include placeholders for those and assume the config was already done, but instead he wanted me to write the code for all of the config using specific Python libraries and online docs for syntax. So I spent a good chunk of time reading docs, copying syntax from example code, and maybe 30 secs on actual logic, during which he asked no questions and made no comments, despite me talking through my thought process the entire time and leaving gaps for his input. When I was done, I had left about 10 min of the scheduled interview time for some back-and-forth, but he just said thanks, he'd send his feedback to the recruiter. This position has been open for >30 days and I think there's a reason why.