After an initial call with the head of Talent Acquisition, there was a brief call with a senior engineer and the CTO, then an at-home project with a suggested time limit of 8 hours. The assignment was to build a working API that will return a list of appointments for a given customer from disparate SQL tables. Because I have not been working in SQL for a few years and wanted to stay within the time limit, I elected to use an ORM and process the data in the API rather than the SQL engine instead of going over time for a small performance improvement (as happens in real life!). Still, the solution was complete, and the entire API was well-documented and had complete test coverage. During the review I notified the team immediately that I was aware that the solution was not the absolute most efficient due to the chosen design, but that on the positive side it was type-safe, had much higher developer velocity, and could be performance tuned with a small refactor. They accepted my solution but seemed unhappy to do so, despite that it completed all the requirements and was very clean and comprehensive. I then received an offer that was below the listed salary range and they refused to negotiate a single euro more than the bottom of the range. Making offers below the stated range (that was confirmed during the interview process) is dishonest and unacceptable.