Friendly call with hiring manager. Then they asked for a take home exercise. I usually don't do those, but I made a rare exception because I really liked the hiring manager. The take home exercise they sent me was a joke. It was "here is a checkout flow, how would you improve conversions". There was no discussion of people problems. Upon following up, I learned that they don't gather any data except for conversion at the end. They don't talk to customers. So when I presented the take home exercise, I focused on solving those structural organizational problems, because I can't do any kind of design without data. Now comes the most ridiculous part: There was this 50+ year old german designer in the call. Your typical 2000s era agency-type, with nerd glasses and a thick beard. He literally asked "Perhaps you can use your imagination to invent user needs instead of using data?" He said in german, but used the english word "Imagination". My wife and I still laugh at the absurdity of that moment. 4 designers were in this call, and not a single one understood the concept of working with data, and got offended that I pushed for it and didn't just give them pretty screens. Their excuse was "we are in a transformation project here and we don't have data yet". Needless to say, we didn't end up working together. I can't believe people like this even have jobs.