I applied online for a very niche position which is usually very hard to fill. Due to the low number of candidates applying for such roles, it was expected that they would return back soon! After 4 days they replied and gave a heads up that my CV is being reviewed. Then after a couple of days they came up with a first interview which was supposed to be a technical interview. This needs to be said that there was no HR interview or phone screening which was already a bit surprising! Very fundamental questions were not even asked, like the preferred starting date etc! The interview was with 3 people and they were very nice and respectful. However, to my experience as a person who has been interviewed several times and has interviewed many people, being nice in the interview doesn't show much because everyone on the first meeting tries to be nice! Not being nice on the first meeting is a massive red flag! The most important things to find out about the general vibe of a company are the way the process of hiring is designed and the way the recruitment team communicates about the steps, talks about expected outcome, requirements and so on. These tell much more about the ways people think in a company and the company structure than just being nice in one interview! The interview was supposed to be a technical interview while for some reason the interviewers were just asking high-level questions about my experience and were hesitant to ask any technical questions! In fact there were several moments of awkward silence where they ran off questions and weren't asking anything but overall the impression was positive as the interviewers were very respectful people and the job itself was interesting. A day after the interview, the recruiter returned back to me and asked to do a long-term test to be delivered in 7 days. This was surprising because there was no technical interview and the position was a high level one. Also experienced people have huge responsibilities and committing to a long-term test is nothing preferable! Anyways, I agreed with doing the test. After receiving the test, it turned out they sent me a test for another discipline which has nothing to do with my CV! I complained a bit about it and told them I just do some parts which are general programming. This needs to be said that this was already a big red flag for me, the only reason I continued was because of family reasons that I need to move to Germany and I preferred to go there with a local job but in a normal situation I would have withdrawn at this point. Expecting a candidate to do a long-term task for another discipline with full commitment and with no technical interview is just not OK! This says the hiring team expects you to commit to the work but they don't even spend time to provide any related test plus the fact giving long-term tests to experienced candidates is actually 80's! Modern thinking companies don't do this anymore as there are many other ways to measure the skills of the candidates! I dedicated a full weekend around 24 hours of work and e-mailed the test back to them after the weekend. They responded after a week with a rejection letter and some comments from the people reviewing the test. Most of the comments had a very low technical weight! Some comments like "i don't understand this part" or some general C++ guidelines which are not working in the context of the test and not necessarily working in production-level code or some points which were actually incorrect! This means the reviewers didn't spend time reading the codes while they expect the candidates to spend time on their test with full commitment! Also the HR wrote that they preferred to go with another candidate which are suiting their needs better but this being said that on the first interview, the interviewers were saying that they are not getting any CV to fill this role and they were struggling to fill the role so I assume the recruitment team was not much in touch with the hiring managers before writing they preferred other candidate as just seven days back they told me there are no people applying for the job! Overall the process talked about itself! My advice to the Senior software engineers is that before committing to any long-term test task, just ask for a guarantee that the employer will book a further technical interview with you and the tech team so you can clearly discuss your technical decisions otherwise just withdraw from your application. Don't forget the fact that when a company asks you to spend your weekend or after work times to do a long task for them and then they come back to you with unclear technical answers and escape listening to your words, this is actually a soft form of power abusing and the senior developers have the ability to battle such hiring habits of employers in game development. So do your part to make this industry a better place for all the developers!