Interview for data engineer position in Seattle. The telephonic interview consisted of 5 SQL and 5 programming questions, as others have pointed out. I had two main issues:

1. The SQL setup in CoderPad was in PostgreSQL. While running queries, I encountered data type errors that are specific to PostgreSQL. While this might come as second nature to someone who uses PostgreSQL daily, for most, it can really throw them off. Simple integer math was failing. I was able to complete 3 full solutions and get partial results on the 4th question while explaining the rest of the approach to the interviewer's satisfaction.

2. While the programs were simple, their execution seemed to get stuck on edge cases or 'None' test cases. I had this problem more than once, and even the interviewer wasn't able to resolve the problem before deciding to move to the next question. My 4th solution was complete but failed on the edge case test case again, and I didn't get a chance to fix it.

While these problems seem trivial and not an issue in most cases, they do play a part when a candidate is timed and under pressure to do as much as possible.

At the end of the day, I ended up spending precious time debugging environment/runtime issues that don't really represent my engineering capabilities.

The level of severity is in line with what folks have mentioned above. They have a new question set. It's funny that they kept asking the same questions for more than a year before changing them out.