The interview was to be an all-day assessment-center event. In other words, the day would be comprised of various interviews, simulated meetings, a prepared presentation, lunch with the managers, etc. Unfortunately, the experience was miserable and revealed just how disorganized, unprofessional and hostile the management at Detroit Diesel is. The night before the interview, Detroit Diesel invited us three candidates out for a tour of the facility, which I accepted without hesitation. After the tour of the factory, some members from HR gave a lengthy presentation about the company until about 9 PM. As we were on our way out, one of the HR employees gave us each a packet with a prompt to be addressed in a presentation the next morning. In other words, this person assigned us the task of preparing a 30 minute presentation on a technical topic late at night before a 7:30 AM interview. Once I got home, it was about 10 PM. I spent a good hour and a half organizing and preparing this presentation. I arrived to Detroit Diesel the next morning running on about 4.5 hrs of sleep, but had my presentation. My first task was to present the talk, so I walked into the board of hiring managers and set up my presentation. Just to give you some background, the prompt stated that some customer complained of a vague problem with his engine, and asked me to devise a method to solve the problem. The prompt was very open-ended and asked for a basic problem-solving method. During my presentation, I spoke about the importance of decomposing problems into sub-systems and the need to understand various hierarchies of information, especially within an engine. I gave some specific examples in this scenario about what I'd do and how to proceed if some ideas didn't work. Immediately after my presentation, some of the managers interjected and started firing off technical questions in a manner that conveyed a lack of seriousness and a strong sense of dissatisfaction with my original presentation. I remained calm and answered the questions to the best of my ability, and consistently tried to convey important points about functional decomposition that the original prompt had required. To my confusion, the managers became increasingly hostile throughout the Q&A as some sneered and rolled their eyes. Needless to say, the rest of the day did not go very well, as I was exhausted from the night before, anxious from the extreme scrutiny by the hiring managers and, in general, very dissatisfied by the company's overall treatment of me. The 2 HR reps running the event were disorganized and made inappropriate or political remarks, which was very confusing. Daimler's treatment of the candidates was so bad that it really makes you wonder whether the company organizes this day for the sole purpose of torturing people. It was a very unfortunate experience, but on the other hand, it revealed many unprofessional practices of the company. In the end, I accepted a handsome offer from a competitor firm that treated me with respect and was genuinely interested in my capabilities. Live and learn.