Unfortunately, this has turned out to be a complete waste of my time.

I applied online via the company's website and received an email from the internal Talent team quite quickly. We had a good discussion about role specification, my salary expectations, and the general interviewing process.

I was initially quite surprised this company asks for a 5-hour-long panel interview, but I thought, "Let's try it," and went ahead with the next stages.

Questions varied from stage to stage, but altogether, they were all adequate to the role itself and the level of seniority.

I was, however, surprised when told by the interviewer during the technical coding stage (for this role - SQL only) that he was absolutely happy to just see pseudocode, as my thought process is the most important part of this interview.

I was surprised and decided to simply write queries as I normally would.

This becomes relevant at a later stage, as I was informed a couple of days later that the team liked me and wanted to make me an offer. However, in their opinion, my coding abilities were lesser than what's expected at a senior level.

I was shocked as I proposed a subquery (which worked as expected) while being told they were looking for a HAVING statement in there. OK? You cannot have it both ways. You either make it clear that you want this query to run without the use of a subquery, or you are actually looking for any working solution. Also, why mention multiple times that pseudocode is all you are after?

I did indeed receive an offer... £25k lower than what I mentioned during my very first conversation with the Talent Acquisition person. How can you justify ignoring candidates' financial expectations, dragging them through 5 hours of panel interview, looking for a mediocre reason to "downgrade" their level, and then offer them a sum that is so much lower than your budget?

You have wasted my time, you have wasted your own engineers' time. Very disappointing behavior on your end.

Window function, data modelling exercise