Overall the interview process was unpleasant and both the technical team member I spoke with as well as several HR staff in the recruiting process were exceedingly rude, capped off with over a month of no communication followed by an automated rejection email. When I reached out for feedback, I was told the company is unable to offer any feedback.
My initial contact was with an HR recruiter who chatted briefly about the job description and then pressured and hounded me for my salary information, even stating that I could not proceed with interviewing at all unless I gave my salary requirements.
When I finally mentioned my salary requirements, the recruiter replied in an odd way. She immediately said, "That's definitely in line with what we want to pay." My salary requirement was definitely on the higher side of the market for this position, and the hasty response made me feel that the recruiter was just trying to placate me, basically to keep me on the hook for more interviews regardless of whether or not the company actually had a budget in the range of my salary requirements.
The next interview was a technical phone screen with a manager for the hiring team. She asked me some questions about machine learning, but it seemed clear very quickly that she did not herself have much experience with the technical details of machine learning, and functioned more as a manager. This is not a bad thing, but it made the conversation awkward because she was trying to act like a technical authority on machine learning and come across like she was challenging me, but she clearly did not understand some of the finer points of the machine learning algorithms I discussed and her bravado seemed misplaced.
After the discussion about machine learning, she asked me to follow a link to an online code portal (I was not told beforehand that there would be any interactive coding in the interview, but I like coding, so I didn't mind).
I was asked two very juvenile coding questions: one was how to write some code to split incoming text into a collection of word counts. No details were given about memory limits or performance requirements, so I wrote a quick algorithm to do it with a hash table. The interviewer seemed happy with my answer and gave positive feedback.
The next question was a pretty classic and pretty antagonistic sort of coding trivia or hazing question. The question was how to write a function to compute the exponential of an integer argument.
You can do this easily with a for-loop or while-loop, and if you can use floating point numbers, you can do it efficiently with exp and log. But there is a nasty trick to do it recursively for integers, using the exponent divided by two so you end up with only log2(k) recursive calls (where k is the exponent).
I spotted all this and wrote up three different solutions highlighting these different cases, and mentioned the trade-offs and complexity issues. I hate when companies ask these pointless questions, but the interviewer seemed happy.
Lastly the interviewer asked me to discuss pros and cons of object oriented design. Once again, I got the impression that she was not skilled as a developer and probably should have deferred to a different team member to ask this type of question. I spoke about some job experience with functional programming and different design ideas that cast doubt on whether OO programming with inheritance is a good idea. She did not seem happy about this, but did not present any technical counterpoints or further discussion.
After this call, I never heard back from the company for over a month. I wrote a few times to ask if my candidacy was still open, and finally after enough emails, I received an automated rejection with no feedback.
When I replied to the HR recruiter to ask for feedback, she very rudely said they have a policy to give no feedback, and it felt very clear she viewed my request for feedback as an annoyance and was not shy about letting me see her frustration with my request.
Overall the interviews were so-so but the recruiters should really be kinder and more professional when replying to candidates, and they should offer sincere feedback.
