SimpleBet

SimpleBet Interviews

1. Apr 25, 2022

   Senior Data Engineer Interview

   Anonymous Employee in United States

   No Offer

   Negative Experience

   Easy Interview

   Application

   I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at SimpleBet (United States) in Apr 2022

   Interview

   Pros: The process itself was pretty snappy, under 3 weeks from start to finish, which is always a plus. I got to meet some interesting and compassionate people working very hard to build a neat product
   
   Cons: I didn't feel I had an opportunity to differentiate myself or showcase my technical skills with how easy the technical portion of the interview was, which gave me a bad feeling going into the final interviews.
   
   I am a non-traditional candidate with just a few years of experience, so the fact that the technical portion was mostly a cakewalk for me made me feel like the process would ultimately boil down to either credentials or years of experience, neither of which work in my favor.
   
   The first technical interview involved interacting with an API in Python and reshaping the returned data in a certain way. I did enjoy this one because it was more practically oriented and open-ended
   
   The second technical interview just involved just answering some trivia questions about Python, which I finished answering 30 minutes early. This interviewer said he was impressed with how fast I answered his questions, and after some Q&A from my side he ended the interview about 25 minutes early. This technical interview felt overly easy and a bit rushed, and since these were essentially trivia questions I couldn't do much to differentiate here.
   
   During the process I met a lot of people, which I also generally find to be a con. It's complicated because these roles tend to involve considerable collaboration with other teams and stakeholders, so it's important to get a sense for how someone might communicate with other collaborators, especially non-engineers.
   
   At the same time, it's rare to find a candidate who will vibe with every single person they meet, especially given the higher stakes nature of an interview setting. I find (having worked on processes like these myself) that the more people involved, the more the process will tend to be biased in favor of extroversion or similarities with other members of the organization.
   
   At each step, I received nothing but positive feedback from everyone I met, then was rejected after a digital onsite and meet with the CTO with a form "we decided to move forward with another candidate" email
   
   Getting rejected after getting nothing but positive feedback throughout the process is a little strange but not unheard of, but it's not cool to then use a form email to reject someone who's invested several hours of time in your process and not give feedback to boot.
   
   Those factors (lack of feedback & form rejection) gave me the impression that they put a large volume of people through their entire interview pipeline, and that I never really had a chance from the outset. Either that or it boiled down to "culture fit" or me not vibing with someone
   
   I did genuinely enjoy getting to meet some really smart and compassionate people working in an interesting space, and I know that it's hard to run a successful interview process that doesn't leave someone feeling slighted, but the devil is in the details, and I think they could have done better in my case
   

   Interview

   Python trivia (questions about PEP8, what is decorator syntax, what is a context manager and how to implement one)

   Answer Question