I applied directly to Qimia. I applied for an entry level position as Data Scientist. The first interview was a Skype interview with the business responsible CEO. When the interview started he was using Skype from his cell phone. He had poor connection and we had to switch to a regular phone interview. He made me some general questions about myself, my experience, interests. It was more or less like the first interview you do with HR. The interview was smooth; the guy was quite serious, did not seem very friendly. At the end of the interview he said "the salary you ask for is very high, but we'll see what we can do about it". He changed the topic immediately without giving me any chance to answer. (I was asking for 50000€ /year) Then they send me an invitation to do a coding test on codility.com I got a 89% on the test, which I think was a very good result. These test aren’t easy, especially if you are not familiar with these kind of tests, as was my case. These tests usually involve programming and optimizing sort/search algorithms. So, next interview was another Skype interview, this time with the technical CEO. He made me questions about my experience, about myself, my interest, why I want to work for Qimia, etc. This guy was also very serious, not nice to talk to. Nothing worth mentioning here except that at some point, he said: “I have seen your test results. It was good, but with your experience you could have done it better”. Sure! I still can go from 89% to 100%. That comment was totally out of place and it was not nice to hear at all. Anyhow, now we get to the most interesting part: they “invited” me to do a test work day with them at their office in Cologne. I agreed. They asked me to bring my own laptop since they did not have enough computers there. OK, so I did. The office was fine, more or less what you could expect from a start-up, nothing fancy. I meet the technical CEO and he gives me a couple of tasks to be completed by the end of the day. I was supposed to do some stuff in Java (Maven and JUnit) and then some other stuff with Scala and Spark. I should remark here that I had only previous experience with Java (not Maven, Junit, Scala nor Spark) and the technical CEO also knew it, since he asked me that specifically on the Skype interview. I spent the first part of the day from 10.00 to 13.00 (lunch time) setting up the environment in my laptop. It wasn’t easy since I had a previous Java SDK version and as I found out later it was causing a conflict with the new tools I was supposed to use (IntelliJ, Maven, Hadoop and Docker). After the first 30 minutes trying to set up the environment, I seriously considered leaving the place, as the tasks he gave me really seemed some kind of bad joke. But I decided to stay and attempt to do it anyhow, who knows, maybe the test was to show some perseverance after all. At 13.00 I had lunch with the new employees there who were doing a training course. There were 10 of them. Curiously they were all from Eastern Europe. They were nice people. After lunch I continued and I managed to set up all the programs I needed and I found out how Maven works. And I started coding the first lines. After what was about 15 minutes of actual coding, the CEO interrupts me and asks me to follow him to his office. There he said to me, literally: “I am very disappointed on you” (Wow! How can he be disappointed on someone he is interviewing....?) He said that as I was a Java developer I should know how to work with Maven and Junit. (On the skype interview he asked specifically about these tools and I said I had no experience using them. What point was he trying to make? My feeling was that everything was a prepared scene so I fail to deliver the tasks and offer me less money. It would have suffice by saying that that is a start-up and they don't have much money. I would have understood it). Anyway, he said he may consider me for the position but that their salaries were between 35000€-45000€. I answered that if they offered me something closer to 45000€ I might take the offer (even with this awful experience I still regarded it as an opportunity to get into the field of Data Science. As a consultant I would be likely working at the client and wouldn’t have to deal with this guy). Two weeks later I got and accepted an offer from another company. They never gave me an answer. I don’t care anyway. As you can see this interviewer made me angry enough to write all these lines, and I don’t usually write any public stuff on the internet. I really think they do not deserve running a company and being responsible for other employees, as they lacks human skills and will probably mistreat their employees. It has been the worst experience I had in a job interview in my life. I have felt really disrespected. One of the hardest things was to refrain myself from answering to the nice comments they said to me.