Brief call with HR before being sent a technical exercise. The technical exercise is a simple task to parse a CSV, one field of which has some messy name data in it (multiple names in one field), look to extract individual names from that field and return an array of those names. The exercise states that you can create a front end or just create 'a simple class that loads the CSV from the filesystem'. I quickly produced a simple, clear, solution to the technical task, using a BDD approach. I have over 20 years of successful software development experience, have lectured in computer science, have built and ran very successful development teams. I ran my solution past a few other lead developer friends of mine who said it was fine and their feedback was ridiculous. They fed back that the solution was too simple and at the same time 'structurally messy'. The class had 3 methods! ( parseFile, parseLine, parseName ) . They also said the tests needed to be more 'nuanced' whatever that meant, despite the tests covering all the example scenarios given and more besides. When asked, they had no "ideal solution" available. Despite my long and successful experience in the industry they weren't even prepared to discuss the solution with me. They were happy to waste my time with a tech test, yet none of theirs to properly discuss or feed back. It appears that either they are not really serious about recruiting or they have a lead dev who has a distinct idea about how everything should be done, and it's their way or no way. Sending out these tech tests pretty much indiscriminately along with their response smacks of a chest thumping, narcissistic exercise where they seek to pick any fault possible with what comes back to boost their ego. I can only imagine what their code reviews are like, or how they are doing with staff turnover in their development department. I would avoid applying here, but if you do, and really do want the job then your best bet would likely be to massively overcomplicate your solution to the problem and just hope that it fits in with their lead dev's ideal. Apparently they have been recruiting for some time...