Met with interviewer for initial screening on Zoom. Their set up was in low light so I couldn't see their face well and the virtual background was clipping constantly. They seemed to have no clue who I was and hadn't seen my resume, despite the fact they reached out to me first on a job posting site. A bit unprofessional, but I figured I could look past that if second impressions were better. The interviewer asked some generic questions and then repeatedly cut me off. They did not seem genuinely interested in hearing my answers; just wanted to introduce the technical challenge as quickly as possible and get off the call. Lasted less than 10 minutes. The technical challenge involved implementing a real-time document editing software using web sockets (think Google Docs) from scratch. Front-end, back-end, and any infrastructure that I might choose to set up in order to host it. The description said that it should take "up to 16 hours" and I was given 3 days, Friday-Sunday. First off, it's a bit absurd to ask someone to drop their entire weekend plans on a dime. For a lot of people this would not be feasible, and that doesn't mean they aren't qualified; just that they have a separation between work time and non-work time. It's a bit much to think that someone working a full time job with other life responsibilities could commit this much with no advance notice. I went ahead with it anyway since I didn't have specific plans and I thought the problem statement was interesting. I was hoping that they were looking to see what I could put together in that time, and not expecting a 100% complete solution. I built out all the API routes and implemented the algorithm fairly well, with just a few edge cases unfinished. I hosted it in AWS and wrote infrastructure-as-code, hoping for some brownie points there. My front-end looked decent although it was incomplete, but that seemed less important given I applied for a backend role anyway. It became clear that 16 hours was unrealistic. I spent waaaay more time than that and still didn't finish. In my opinion, you would have to have done this problem yourself before in order to stand any realistic shot at meeting it. I emailed them to ask if I should submit it incomplete at the end of the time, or continue until it was done. I got mixed responses, with one saying to submit it as is and another asking how long it would take to finish. At this point I was burnt and didn't feel like giving them more free labor after all the red flags, so I submitted it as is. The description said they would respond within 3 days. Unsurprisingly, they never reached out after my submission.