Hearst interview questions

After the first panel interview it goes to take home assignment. Instead of Assignment, they give you an internal Project and will try to get a candidate to work for them for free! They basically send you a problem they could not solve via Github, hoping to steal your code for free. The position has been open for longer than a year. Huge waste of time. In the interview, they told me about aggressive funding goals! Their Data Science team is entirely off shore.

Mock assignment required before interview. Once successful, moved on to a Zoom interview with two people. Asked basic questions about interest and experience. Bit of a good cop-bad cop thing going on. Were not very clear about pay, time involvement, and job difficulty. I asked several questions for clarity. They seemed to interpret that as a lack of confidence. They also asked for references before giving me any salary information.