=== 1 === After application - no screening call or interview. I was immediately given a massive take-home assignment requiring a full production-grade DataOps pipeline: Terraform infrastructure, Airflow orchestration, dbt transformations, BigQuery, and CI/CD. This requires 15-20 hours of work. === 2 === I submitted a working end-to-end solution on time. Then came weeks of silence. When I followed up and restricted repository access due to the passed deadline, the recruiter claimed the team was "currently reviewing" my code. This was physically impossible, as they had no access at that time. === 3 === The rejection eventually came with a vague claim of "architectural misses" - without citing a single specific example. When I told them I would make my repository public as an open-source project to protect my IP, HR immediately pushed back and asked me not to publish it. === 4 === Red Flag 1. The GitHub account used to review my Senior-level infrastructure was actively starring beginner-level tutorials like "Data Engineering Zoomcamp". === 5 === Red Flag 12 This process closely mirrors "brewdogging" — assigning massive tasks to harvest free architectural blueprints because the internal team lacks the seniority to build them. === 6 === Do not invest days of free work into their process.