Spent a month interviewing for SM. Very poor experience. Had an initial conversation with HR in which I gave my salary expectation. She never told me I was outside the range. I was weary from other Glassdoor postings as the salaries were half of what I requested but assumed I would be told if I was too high like every other interview I’ve ever had. I went through 3 rounds with the hiring manager who I now realize that I make/was requesting more money than. Essentially he is an academic who “hacked” (his words) an app together and needed someone who had scaled apps in this framework on Linux in an enterprise environment. This included having to complete a coding exercise which was to build an app with their data. Super easy (took me a few hours), take survey data and go from long to wide format. I provided the application code along with how you setup data pipelines and REST APIs in the program I was asked to code in. Far exceeding the expectations of the assignment and the capabilities of the team. Even after this I went through another interview to ask how to scale which I gave the sauce for as I’ve already done so a couple times at companies. So taking some steps back SM received application code, pipelines, and REST APIs on their actual data and exactly how to scale it. The “bonus” on the coding assignment asked to database the app which I came to find out the guy hadn’t done, he just puts data on a GoogleDrive haha. I was told the person who received the position skill set was stronger. Based on a LinkedIn post, I saw this person. A girl straight out of school (no masters) with a couple internships and no real world experience. So essentially, they hired someone half/third the price while keeping me in the process to receive my code and exploit work from a “veteran” (hiring managers words). I never review anything... but this process completely wasted my time as I was never going to get the role based on salary and my time on coding in this frame work is valuable. Based on this experience and the lack of competency I encountered from HR and the hiring manager, I would never want to work at this place and would encourage people to be weary to not do free work for these guys.