The one-on-one interviews were pretty straightforward. When I arrived at their offices (located in a co-working space), I was greeted by CEO Sara Menker, who notified me that I would be meeting with their Design Lead before wrapping up with her. I proceeded to sit down with the Design Lead, and had a pretty straightforward conversation about my background and the platform they were in the process of building. The Product Manager was seated to my immediate right and had his back to me the whole time, which was a little off-putting. After the talk with the Design Lead I spoke with him, and he was pretty down to earth. Finally, I spoke with the CEO Sara, which went fine. Towards the end said they'd like to move forward, and that they usually have candidates for that type of role complete a coding exercise as a next step. I thought that was fine, and before receiving it, had a phone interview with one of their Data Scientists based in Nairobi as well, which I also thought went well.
When I got the programming exercise I was a little taken aback by the scope, but completed it anyway in about 15 hours over a few days. After submitting it, however, I was contacted by the recruiter who got me the interview who told they were going to pass due to "wanting more strength on the exercise". I thought it rather unprofessional that they didn't think to alert me of that fact personally, and/or give me some feedback as to what could have been done better. After letting the recruiter know that, the Product Manager got in touch and told me they weren't interested at this time but didn't provide any details. I'm fine with that, as it wasn't the right fit from my perspective in retrospect, but I think they could have dealt with things more professionally, and that their expectations for expected performance on the coding exercise are prohibitively high.
