Applied online followed by an initial screening call. The interviewer was engaged but we did run over time. I was told about the company, the history, a bit about the product and the culture. How academic they were was mentioned multiple times. At this stage the team seems to be entirely composed of people with the same background. Post PhD's doing data science with high abstract knowledge but little industry experience. I was intrigued by the claim that independent thinking is encouraged but worried that the business only seems to hire a certain type of person. I was told the next stage was a technical assessment followed by a review and a full day onsite interview. They said my experience and background was interesting to them and they were open to discussing various roles with me. On this basis I was interested enough to proceed with the technical test, which meant a 90 minute brain teaser quiz of 6 questions from a third party provider under tight time constraints.
I had 3 days to complete the 90 minute test. It was a series of code snippets and questions similar to leet code. You had to repair certain logic or build it from scratch to achieve a certain result. The code was assessed automatically for correctness and optimisation. This is an excellent indicator of how much time you spend solving these questions. However, it has no relevance to the real world. I was informed I would hear back within a few days of completing the test. Two weeks after completing the assessment I followed up and was told I would get feedback asap. Two days later a generic rejection came through. This is disappointing on multiple levels. The first is that no feedback was given, just "thanks for your application". This is unfortunate but predictable given the other reviews. More disappointing was the assurance on the initial call that the test was a formality and only part of the process. Obviously this was a lie.
