The process isn't set for your success. First meeting with recruiter. Generic and common interview to superficially expose your experience and the position. This took some back and forth to schedule, I had to share my availability twice. Second interview with a technical member of the team. This was a MLOps position so we discuss my background both in Ops and ML. Conversation goes well until a technical assessment is mentioned. At no given moment during the previous chats/emails with the recruiter I was told there would be such assessment. Nevertheless I accept the task and try to show my thought process while solving the challenge. Ended the challenge proud as this was the first white board I was doing after several years in Ops work. However the interviewer reproached me claiming I didn't know the basics of Python. I feel I was penalized for sharing my thought process and questioning the name of libraries (things I could google for). I still fail to see the relevance of such task for the position. Probably could have done better if prepared. My fault I didn't ask the recruiter what would be the next step. Preparing the candidate is key for such challenges, that's where other companies running white board tests succeed and Tripadvisor fails.

Good, although, sometimes struggling in providing you information about when interview will be leaving you wondering. Technical interview was good, I went into in uncertain as I wasn't sure about if I could solve a challenge. Recruiter was very nice and informative as well. Gutted to not progress onto next stages but they layout whole process for you and provide with you with feedback even if you fail the technical interview. I hope to re-apply soon when I become more confident with approaching technical assessments cause these do not correlate with your day to day duties as SE.