Alacrity Solutions interview questions

I interviewed for a Software Engineer role through a staffing agency that exclusively recruits for this company. Unfortunately, the experience was frustrating and unfairly assessed. Despite explicitly seeking “only 5 years’ experience” candidates, the interview demanded solving six SQL problems plus several JavaScript/C# questions in a single hour—an unrealistic bar even for seasoned engineers. Instructions were confusing; for example, the interviewer showed outputs like “dept1, dept1, dept2” without clarifying whether they expected department IDs vs. names, which created unnecessary ambiguity. The CoderPad environment malfunctioned multiple times. It threw exceptions when inserting into the real-time database even though the logic and query were correct; in fact, records were inserted despite the errors (observed by both me and the interviewer). The interviewer even said, “Your code is correct; I don’t know why it’s throwing an exception,” yet the final feedback labeled me as someone who “struggled.” That’s an unfair judgment based on a platform glitch, not my technical performance. The session was also poorly managed—about five minutes lost to casual football talk at the start, and the interview ended twenty minutes early, cutting actual problem-solving time even further. This company doesn’t publicly post openings on LinkedIn or job boards and relies only on third-party recruiters, who acknowledged that many candidates report the same issues. Overall, the process felt disorganized, unrealistic, and not reflective of real-world engineering work.