The recruiter reached out asking me to schedule some time to interview with an engineer. The engineer did not call me at the specified time and the recruiter did not respond to my email until hours later. He asked me to provide more availability for a different interview. I did so, but then had to follow up twice before he responded, asking if I had the first call (?) despite the fact that this was all on the same email chain. I explained to him the series of events again, provided more availability, and he scheduled me for another interview.
That interview was actually great. The engineer asked smart questions and ramped up the complexity in a way that made sense. It felt like an enjoyable conversation more than a typical interview and by the end of it I felt like we had actually gone through a lot of material. He was very respectful and friendly.
After that, they sent me a 4-part coding challenge. I would say that any one of these parts would be appropriate as a standalone take home challenge, but not all 4. The document was very sloppily written and parts of it made little sense. The supplied 'input files' were basically a mess of data and the instructions said to use them however I wished. Nothing about the challenge was particularly difficult, but in order to do a good representation of work for everything they asked for, it would have been extremely time consuming. I showed it to a few of my friends in the industry and they all agreed that it would be at least 8-10 hours of work to complete and do a good job of it.
To me this is far too much time to demand for an interview and I sent an email explaining this. They did not respond. I would advise staying away from this company. It looks like they pay well, but if a company doesn't respect your time during the interview, I can only imagine what it is like as an employee.