While I understand, expect, and hope for difficult situational and scientific questions during an interview, this experience was exceptionally off-putting. Each question was equivalent to a dissertation question that needed to be answered in 20 minutes, with no resources, and with the requirement that you need to think out loud. It was scheduled for an hour, but both interviewers thought it was for 90 minutes, so they left me very little time to ask my own questions at the end. While I understand the interviewers want to ensure they hiring a strong, analytically minded problem-solver for their team, this approach was a jarring, frustrating, and a totally unrealistic experience. They knew the answers to these questions that they spent weeks, months, or years uncovering with a team of people and analytical resources but expected me to blow them away with thoughtful answers under intense pressure with no resources in a short amount of time. To add insult to injury, one of the two interviewers was quite negative towards some of my assumptions and problem-solving ideas, which set a negative tone for the rest of the interview. Both interviewers tried to "help" me by giving me clues and reading their minds but I didn't catch on and I got flustered. Frankly, the second interviewer made me feel stupid and it was quite a triggering feeling. A better approach would've been for them to ask the questions while maintaining neutral, or little to no expressions. Instead, their approach caused me to second-guess myself, which contributed to my poor performance. And by the way, you'll only get $82k salary to blow them away with your dissertation-level problem-solving skills.
