I received an email from Best Buy after applying through their website. The first thing they asked me was to let them know what time would work for a brief phone interview.

I followed up by asking how long the interview would be and also specified that I would like to do it before work or after work. So I asked them to please also let me know what was the earliest they could do it and what was the latest the interview could end.

They seemed like straightforward questions to me. I expected an answer like "we can start as early as 9am, the interview will take no more than 30 minutes, so we can start as late as 4:30pm, ending at 5pm."

I did not get an answer to any of my questions. He only said that we could certainly arrange a time after work and to let him know what time.

If he had even just answered my question about how long the interview was, that would have been helpful. Then I would have proposed the ideal time for me.

He had also addressed me by my last name in that email, even though my email was addressed from "Firstname Lastname" and I had signed my email with my first name. So this was immediately frustrating.

I checked out the person on LinkedIn and it was a developer. Bad idea to send a developer to do this kind of work.

The phone interview was fine, and I became interested in what they were doing. He was going to follow up with a technical take-home assignment.

The take-home assignment was a joke (see below). After receiving a non-response from the guy to my questions about it (which included my code, which I'm 99% sure he didn't notice was attached and that he didn't read the part where I said, "please see the attached zip file containing my code"), I clicked "archive" on the email thread and moved on with my life.

Design a parking lot management system that allows a parking lot with N entries and M exits. Control the entry and exit count. It should be able to identify the capacity and lock the entries until parking is available again.