Had a phone screen at first, spoke to the CTO, where he told me they would bring me in for an interview where i'd meet the different departments, and do a design problem. He also said I would get to meet the customers. So I went in to do the interview. 1) At first, the lead software dev sat down, spoke to me, and gave me an overview of the whole company and it was a very good conversation. He was the smartest guy I spoke to there. Easily. 2) He passed it on to an engineer to come in. It was awkward. And she sat down and said, okay the next part of this interview is a Javascript, HTML, and CSS challenge. I sat there and said. What?! I thought this was for a Product Designer Role. And she said yes, it is. I'm like, aren't you guys going to test my knowledge on UX and all the other things that go along with being a Product Designer. She asked me to explain in detail, and then she told me speaking to customers, doing research, competitive analysis, etc is the job of a Product Manager, not a product designer, and I was expected to just be given features to implement by the PM, working in isolation, and be able to code it from end to end. I told her that that's not what I thought I would be doing. Do you guys have a design challenge or anything prepared? She brought up one of the pages of the pages of their product that had literally 5 graphs, and 3 different tables with many different kinds of data, and a list over 100 vehicles just aligned at different parts of the page, and she said, ok, design a solution for allowing our customer to quickly be able take in all this data from a quick glance. I told her there would be no way I could come up with a good solution till I spoke to customers and wrapped my head around what all that data meant. Anything I do now is going to be crap with the limited information I have. I very roughly wrote a couple quick ideas on a paper to brainstorm with her to try and figure out more what all that data meant, and she took that paper outside and showed it to her peers as if it was my design solution. Very unprofessional and manipulative on her part. Then she brought up how I had nice, pretty illustrations and icons on my dribbble and asked how I could use things like that to make the page look good. This was someone that clearly thought design was about making things look pretty, and had no real understanding about the design process and how the design process can make the product much better from a holistic point of view. They were very much not equipped to handle a true design interview. The Product Manager comes in, tells me there seems to be confusion about the role, said he's loving speaking to me, and told me "it seems you have a heavy user empathy approach, what is the point of that? What's with this whole focus on putting the user first and talking to customers. The CEO does that." I was a little surprised he said that. But, he was an MBA, so it is not surprising. Business education is still based on running businesses as if it were still the industrial era. And then he talked about me being a CS undergrad. I guess they were looking for a web dev that could also take whatever they wanted to put on the page and make it look pretty. That's what they thought design was. A web developer at a product designer salary. Nonetheless, they cancelled lunch and told me to email him more of my work and that they would bring me in again. Which was unprofessional, considering they had promised lunch before the interview. I knew it wasn't going anywhere and I knew working at a company that did not value good design would be a disaster, but I figured I would be PC and send the files. I also sent him an email explaining that Product Designers don't just make things look pretty. If it was just making things look pretty and coding it, well then you were looking for a Web Developer and Visual Designer. Unsurprisingly, he quickly emailed me back and said thank you, I enjoyed your work. Unfortunately at this time we feel you don't have the right experience for this role. Lol. What a huge disaster. Now I know to to make sure to only interview at design first companies that understand the value of it. Bullet dodged. It seems as though they can't get a designer to stick around based on what I heard, and I am not surprised.