Applied online for a Data Science role. Recruiter got back to me relatively quickly and informed me I'd be a better fit for the 'Analytics Engineer' role. It sounds more like a typical Data Science position while the 'Data Scientist' position itself isn't very technical or mathematical in nature. Strange naming of jobs.
Briefly spoke with interviewer about salary expectations and the company. He seemed nice enough and scheduled call with hiring manager.
Had a 30 minute call with hiring manager on the phone where we talked about some of my past projects. It was completely discussion based with no difficult math/data science type questions. He asked a few questions a bit more in depth and the talk went overall well. This manager seemed knowledgeable about the requirements of the job and was pleasant to speak with.
Heard back same day about a 'data' exercise to complete in R which should be easy for any mildly competent R programmer. Takes about 30-45 minutes to actually solve but I spent about 2 hours total to write it up nicely and present two approaches.
Recruiter scheduled call with hiring manager's manager. This is where things start to go sour. It was another 30 minute call (I was really expecting at least one of these calls to be an hour where we could go over technical qualifications and so on), and he ended up calling about 5 minutes late (which in itself is fine). Every other word out of this guy's mouth was 'Uhh' or 'Uhm'. After asking him a few questions and hearing him talk about the role and data science in general, I didn't get the sense that he knew what he was talking about or was even qualified to be a Data Scientist, let alone run that team.
He asked me a series of fit-based questions which I assume he read off a list. 'Tell me about a time where you learned something' 'Tell me about a time where you had to balance requirements.', etc. My answers were probably not great since I really thought we'd speak more about the actual role and perhaps go over some technical stuff. Either way after about 15 minutes of this (it's now only 20 minutes into the interview slot), he said we were out of time and let me ask a few hurried questions. I could tell by then that he wanted to get off the call as soon as possible.
Heard back the next day that my background didn't meet their qualifications.