30-40 technical interviews throughout my career and this was easily the worst. Take home is very open ended. The assignment was fine and interesting, actually. It's only 5 or so bullet points of requirements but it says "try to impress us." The recruiter said don't worry about time, just make sure that it's good. So I took my time and tried to impress. It took me a month to finish the challenge between working at my full time job. I submitted the app saying "there's still more I can do, but I feel like it's at a good point and don't want to take too long." "Don't worry, take your time and submit it when you're proud of it." 1 month later, I submit. "Sorry, the role has been filled." wtf.. 1 week later they call me: "The guy we hired quit, are you still interested?" "Sure." I go in for the on-site. The recruiter told me that the take-home was 90% of the interview, and the on-site would just be cultural questions and reviewing the work I did on the take-home assignment. At the onsite they didn't mention my take-home a single time. I was instead introduced to 4 separate engineers one after another asking technical questions. The first 3 were fine and easy, then in comes the CS major and the lead. "Tell us how you would implement an array in a language that doesn't support arrays." "Um, I don't have a CS background." "That's okay, we just want to see how you think." So, of course, without any frame of reference I bomb the question, despite normally being pretty good at algorithms.