I applied online. The process took four weeks.

They seem to be quite all over the place. My interview had to be rescheduled a few times on the same day, and the code review took weeks to happen. During the code review, I got a feeling that one of the people involved clearly did not want to be there and had an attitude the whole time.

The technical assessment definitely takes much longer than they say. It took me at least three times the amount of hours, especially because the requirement is completely vague and there are so many aspects you can focus on. They ask you to create this recipe picker and give you a huge set of scraped incoherent data that should be a take-home assignment in itself. Despite them telling me to focus almost entirely on the UX and the product mindset several times, at the end most of the review was focused on database-related processes. This leads me to believe the person interviewing me had made up their mind before even meeting me, possibly because due to last-minute cancellations they had to resort to someone with little web dev experience (I saw their GitHub).

Being asked about database best practices after setting up a whole fullstack application along with its deployment feels unfair. The process itself was not the worst I've ever had. However, the take-home assignment shows a lack of respect for people's time. I don't think you can assume that someone who has a full-time job also has a week to spend to work on such a vague task to then get such random feedback. The last-minute cancellations are another symptom of their little consideration of people's time.

How would you seed a database with a JSON file containing millions of rows?