Fathom Interview Questions
& Process

The interview involved explaining a machine learning problem I solved in the past. I had to detail my approach to data preprocessing, model training, and how I used domain knowledge. It also required showing how communication played a role and what the overall problem-solving process looked like.

The interview process was generally good, with interviewers who were professional and assessed me fairly. I got feedback based on their notes, which was great. But I have two things to mention about the interviews: 1. The screening round used GitHub Codespaces, which I found a bit confusing. It seemed like I'd have to work through a whole codebase, but I only had to read and finish a few functions in one file, making GitHub Codespaces not really needed. 2. One of the coding rounds had me implement a classic algorithm iteratively. I don't think that's a good interview question because it has a lot of edge cases to debug in 45 minutes, and it doesn't really show how a candidate thinks. It felt like a lot of work, but not very insightful.

So I was in my third round, which was a 2-hour interview with a role play, a live writing test, and a presentation. I really prepped hard for this. They said I did great, but then they just ghosted me. They gave me a timeline for a decision, but I never heard back. No feedback, no decision, nothing. It's a really awful and insulting experience, especially when people take their personal time to prepare so intensely.

even though the job description was for ML, I went through three rounds of pure coding leet code style questions. based on my interview experience and conversations I had with people, if one wants to grow their ML skills and make a resume in ML, this is not the place. you would wind up doing a lot of debugging and software development stuff. you may get the chance to train a model now and then, but don't count on it. in general I enjoyed the questions, but I was disappointed of the interview process and how people behaved. I mean no one even took a minute to introduce themselves to me or ask me who I am and what I do. I felt a lot of pressure doing the live coding. Also, the work life balance sucks at this company and I could even feel it based on their interview process!