Was given a coding skills test immediately after resume screening. There were a number of red flags about the coding test: 1) Technical (programming language) skills required to succeed on coding test were not listed in job description as desired skills (fortunately I had the needed skills) 2) Great disrespect for applicant time was shown: test was described as taking "a few hours". Even in the best of circumstances the test problem would take far longer than that to do well. 3) Test was related to a natural language task. But the text used was primarily extremely obscure words that normal language and english word structure rules would not help on. That became clear when looking at the training data in progress in detail and seeing that I had no idea what the right answer should be most of the time even when most of the problem was solved. So the ML solution would have to not just replicate an english speaker's intuition but in fact be way smarter than a normal english speaker--feasible in the long run but certainly not a few hour task. 4) There was training data, practice test data and then final test data. Practice test data appeared to be different at its core than training data (i.e. not just randomly separated, but intentionally made so that training on training data would perform poorly on test data), but even more importantly the practice test data was not a random sample of what is on the "scored" test data. I practiced on enough practice test data to know statistically that there is < 0.0001 probability that my score on final scored test would have been as low as it was randomly. In other words, they intentionally manipulated test data. Then they told me my score was low and asked if I wanted to work on improving algorithm take test again. I said no. There are a couple different theories I have regarding why they did what they did, but a couple things are clear: 1) they were disrespectful of applicant time 2) they misled applicants 3) they rigged/manipulated test. My #1 theory as to what they were doing was testing how persistent somebody would be in the face of adversity. But this kind of manipulation is still highly inappropriate. -