I've had a phone interview with a technical person and one from HR. The first part was about my CV and the plans of the company. We had a good talk about the nature of the role and I got a very good feeling about the developer culture of the company (which seems rather good for me). After that some Java questions were posed as well as a streaming processing case. I was a bit surprised, because no technical questions were announced. The streaming processing architecture question should be posed on a on-site interview, where one has a white board available. The interview felt like a oral examination at university. I then got a take-home project with a simple application of Apache Flink. The test is more „can the person walk?“ for junior developers, which I think can only be done the wrong way. As the role is technically advanced and the customer facing part is imo more important, I refuse to do it as the signal should be too low and I see it as a losing move. The HR person replied „well that is our process“. The company has ~20-30 employees. I quit the process on my side. It's a bit sad as I think that they have a strong dev culture, but suffer from a heavy academic influence. With my experience in customer facing roles (dealing also with social issues) and mentoring, I could be a valuable asset for the company.