This company doesn't have an HR call. Right from the start they send you a dataset and have you do an analysis on it — pretty simple, takes an hour or two at most.
After passing that, the first round is a phone screen.
45 minutes, just SQL and a product case.
There were two interviewers. I actually thought the question itself was pretty simple — it was about a beverage company that had noticed its sales drop in a certain quarter, and they wanted us to use the company's data to analyze whether sales had actually dropped. There was just one dataset, shared through a Google Doc with screen share.
But the interview experience was really not great. Both interviewers didn't seem to want to communicate at all. Because the question was given so vaguely, I couldn't even tell what they actually wanted me to do. It took forever just to pin down the goal, and the interviewer kept talking in a mumbly, vague way — I felt like they were getting a bit impatient, so I just went ahead and started writing SQL, figuring I'd talk through it as I went.
It was actually a pretty simple problem — just calculate the AVG and compare it, that's it. But along the way I tried several times to confirm the final goal and metrics with the interviewer, and they'd either just say nothing or give some vague answer. When I finally said I was done, the interviewer started nitpicking — it felt like we'd never actually aligned on the level of granularity the whole time.
In the end we didn't even get to the actual case analysis before it was wrapped up in a rush.
In the final Q&A part, they kept giving that same take-it-or-leave-it kind of answer.
Got the rejection email two days later.
Looking back on it, next time I run into an interviewer who doesn't want to communicate, I probably need to just state my assumptions clearly myself and push forward confidently with the analysis.
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