adsquare 

GmbH

Vorstellungsgespräche

Verbesserungsvorschläge

1. The bait-and-switch JD. I applied for a Senior Data Analytics Engineer role. The job description listed dashboards, descriptive and inferential statistics, stakeholder communication, FastAPI, Streamlit, and Jupyter as key responsibilities and must-haves. The mandatory pre-screening test was roughly half Data Science and LLMs. The hiring manager confirmed he wrote both the JD and the test himself. Then during the interview he immediately contradicted everything, calling this "purely an engineering role" and questioning why I mentioned analytics.

2. Aggression, not evaluation. Regardless of what a candidate says in a technical discussion, raising your voice and delivering personal reprimands is not professional conduct. The hiring manager's tone was aggressive throughout, escalating during any disagreement. He read requirements from a printed page for ten minutes - including soft skills like "be proactive." He extended the meeting ten minutes past schedule without asking, leaving zero time for candidate questions.

3. Lectures masking shallow knowledge. He spent another ten minutes explaining why Glue plus Athena is the best architecture in existence, dismissing Snowflake, Databricks, and Redshift as "too expensive" or "inefficient" — apparently unaware that Redshift Serverless or ClickHouse are actual AdTech standards. He presented 1TB of data as an unprecedented challenge to a candidate with documented 30M+ daily event processing experience. He confused database terminology during follow-ups, correcting me where his own understanding was visibly limited.

4. No orchestrator, no DWH, DuckDB in production. He confirmed the team has no Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect. Pipelines run on AWS StepFunctions - a microservice state machine with no backfill, no cross-pipeline dependencies, no DAG monitoring. Athena is a query engine, not a warehouse. DuckDB - an embedded analytics database designed for local experimentation - is part of their production stack. The JD lists Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks as requirements, but they use none of them. When I pointed out the JD listed ChatGPT, Claude, and Ollama as required tools, the hiring manager visibly froze, then admitted only programmers use Amazon Q - the free AWS tool. Penny wise, pound foolish: saving on AWS bills while wasting engineering hours on manual orchestration, retries, backfills, and monitoring that any standard tool handles out of the box.

5. The JD was rewritten after my process. Dashboards moved from key responsibility to nice-to-have marked "not the core function." Statistics removed entirely. Airflow moved from core stack to nice-to-have. A new sentence added in bold: "This is not a Data Analyst role." They also posted a Staff DAE requiring 7+ years, TDD mastery, functional programming, polyglot skills in Scala, Go, C++, and Java — for a team of five running StepFunctions and DuckDB with no orchestrator and no warehouse.

6. The process demands everything, offers nothing. Beyond the pre-screening test and the hiring manager interview, the remaining stages include a home assignment with a strict two-day deadline, a one-hour live coding session, and a team interview with additional technical questions. At no point during the process did the company provide any clarity on salary range or budget - expecting candidates to invest weeks without knowing if compensation is even on the table.

7. A stagnant business pretending to grow. Both the recruiter and the hiring manager presented the company as growing and ambitious. Market data tells a different story: no major funding rounds in over a decade and a marginal market position. The infrastructure confirms it — no investment in proper tooling, an architecture built around minimizing AWS costs rather than engineering efficiency, and job descriptions that read like wishlists disconnected from the team's actual capabilities.

8. GDPR violations confirmed. I asked about the June 2025 Netzpolitik.org report confirming the Berlin Data Protection Authority found significant GDPR violations at Adsquare after an on-site audit. The hiring manager deflected without substance - concerning for a company whose entire product is built on personal location data.

9. The hiring manager is not an engineer. During the interview he described his own background: BI, analytics management, consulting. No software engineering, no pipeline development, no testing experience. This explains everything - the lectures on recently learned topics, the terminology confusion, and the hostility toward any independent technical perspective. This is not a role for a senior peer.

Verbesserungsvorschläge

VP of Engineering person was so rude and seemed like he was asked to attend the interview forcefully. Throughout the interview, he was busy working on his laptop and asked one question that was intended to make the candidate feel bad and humiliated. It was the worst experience for me! Glad I could identify this red flag that saved me from the horror of working in this toxic work culture where the VP of Product (prospective manager) was all quiet even after observing what happened in the interview. He was a young VP with 0 to no wisdom and managerial skillsets, and asked bookish questions that lacked depth!
VP of Product seemed underconfident in his judgment, hence asked a million questions. It was quite visible in the interview.
They couldn't answer my questions satisfactorily.

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

keine

Bewerbungsfragen

Verbesserungsvorschläge

Wenn ich keine Antwort bekomme und die Werbung für dieses Arbeit noch mal in Social Media und auch auf anderen Platforms sehe, finde ich die Firma sehr unprofessionell.

Verbesserungsvorschläge

Zusätzlich zum Anschreiben waren mehrere optionale Aufgaben zu lösen die mehrere Stunden Zeit in Anspruch nehmen. Ich habe diese Aufgaben gelöst, aber nie eine Bestätigung erhalten.