The management in this company (AKA the owner's wife) is a total mess. They wasted weeks of my time and have completely delusional expectations for what they are willing to pay. First you go through a phone screen for about half an hour. Then they ask you to complete a 2 hour assessment where you SSH into one of their servers and solve about 25 utterly trivial command line/programming problems. Rename this file, edit this file, move this file here, write a FizzBuzz generator... No mock problems that would be similar to the type of environment or work you would be doing, only lots of irrelevant and small problems. Implement merge sort? You're LITERALLY NEVER going to do anything like this in a business setting. Why waste people's time with this? You're already asking for people to spend 2 hours on this, at least be respectful of their time. After this, I had a video interview with the owner's wife and one of the developers. The woman spent 95% of the time asking vague questions like "Do you know SQL" or "Do you know how to make a portal website" instead of deferring to the person sitting right next to her who was an actual professional developer and clearly understood the needed skills and could ask way more relevant questions. They also said that the 2 hour assessment wasn't meant to judge skill, but to rather "weed-out" candidates, and it was made by someone who doesn't even work there anymore. How can you make a smart choice about who you hire based on a trivial test that is only meant to weed people out? She also asked about my current salary and rolled her eyes when I declined to answer such a moronic question. You need to pay people what they are worth for the job that they are doing, not try to see if you can leverage their current salary as a tool to pay them a lower wage than the position is worth. This is illegal in several states because it is such a trashy and exploitative thing to do. They want someone who will be the sole developer for their entire business, and someone who will never make mistakes because of the fact that they have government contracts which stipulate uptime. They want someone who will do full stack development, data processing, work on the AWS government cloud, and more, and they want this person to work 100% in person (again, due to gov't contract prohibiting remote work), and so on. They want a single unicorn developer but want to pay them peanuts at the same time and are not willing to settle for anything less. They use a wide salary range of $50-85K to entice applicants, yet are looking to pay the lowest end of that range while expecting the work of someone who SHOULD be getting paid >$85K because they will be the sole person maintaining and developing the entirety of the software for their business.