I can tell you was a non-ideal interview process looks like from the "coding challenge" POV. I had one company pose a "dev challenge" of taking a multi-million

I can tell you was a non-ideal interview process looks like from the "coding challenge" POV. I had one company pose a "dev challenge" of taking a multi-million row public sample data set and the goal was to generate a report from it. This was for an operations job "but everyone has to take the dev challenge". Part of the problem I had with this was that I didn't feel like it was even a dev challenge. I've hand coded reports before and that has always led to a world of pain. I also felt like it was a data sciences challenge, not a dev challenge, and my data science is really rusty. I spent most of the 1-4 hours they said most people complete it in, just thinking about the problem. "If I had to solve this problem in my company, first thing I'd do is look at Crystal Reports. The last thing I'd do is open a file and type "import sqlalchemy"." I set up a repo that did all the operations stuff (remember, it was a Ops job I was applying for), and put together deployment parts to set up a test system and load the data into the database, configure everything, etc... A few weeks later I finally got the parts all to work and was able to solve the problem in an 80x25 screen worth of SQL. I suspect I was the only applicant that solved it in SQL.