One company's idea of an interview was to email me a link to download their ENTIRE source code. The email detailed that, as a technical test they wanted me to implement 'quick search' functionality on their website.

The zip file contained - amongst other nuggets - a local copy of their database complete with 13k rows of unsanitised customer data in one table in particular. All credentials exposed.

I had up to two weeks to complete the 'test' after which I should zip it back up and place it on Dropbox for them to retrieve.

I called them up and asked if they realised what they'd done. They assured me that it was absolutely fine and that, yes, it was real customer data from their production site, but that it needed to be because it took them too long to create more than a handful of fake user profiles so they just exported their prod database instead.

Given that I wasn't actively looking for further employment, and this was shady af, I was going to delete the entire codebase and move on, but then I noticed they had a changes.txt file in the root which detailed implementations of other functionality with information about who did it (including names and email addresses).

I contacted the first name on the list and they quickly replied and told me they were asked to write user login functionality. They submitted their work back to the company but were told they hadn't gotten the job but that they appreciated their efforts. Sure enough, information on their login functionality work was in changes.txt file.

At that point, if it wasn't apparent to you before, it was incredibly clear to me that this company was using technical tests in order to improve their website for free, and then seemingly not bothering to hire the developers, but simply move on to another developer with their next change request.

I'd rather not write about what I did next as there are some legal implications but the company stopped trading a few months afterwards.