SciTec interview questions

I was asked to do a small coding project transforming data in C++. It was expected to take a couple hours, but I spent much more time than that refactoring and attempting to make it polished. The primary part of the interview was a background discussion with 4 employees from various parts of the company followed by some exceedingly simple C++ questions, then a review of my code. They could have extracted the same information from more pointed C++ questions instead of wasting my time with a coding project.