My initial call with the recruiter went great. He was extremely personable and happy to answer my questions. He was really impressed with my skills and experience, and eager to move me along in the interview process. Next I interviewed with the hiring manager who was not personable at all and was strangely judgmental the entire interview. He asked me about very specific SQL functions which we didn't use on my prior team so I didn't know a lot about them off the top of my head. He asked me to explain how I would use a SQL construct and then when I gave an example of how I used them every day, he said that he never used them. He also asked a lot of questions about my knowledge of accounting. I've worked in financial data warehouses so I'm familiar with finance from a data perspective, but I'm not an accountant. He was not impressed with my lack of accounting knowledge. But the worst part was when he asked me about my very first job out of college 8 years ago. I explained it was a basic data entry position and not very relevant to database development, but he grilled me for details. It was 8 years ago, I can't remember what applications they used. It felt as though every question was meant to be a "gotcha." Shockingly, I was asked back for a 3rd interview, which I almost didn't accept. I spoke with a product owner and a data operations manager. They talked a lot about culture, but then they started asking me about my accounting knowledge again. They also gave very contradictory answers about how collaborative their culture was, but they expected everyone to be autonomous.