RootMetrics Interview Questions
& Process

It was a pretty standard process: a phone screen followed by an onsite interview. Both interactions were really pleasant. The onsite started with a quick chat with HR, then I had a couple of back-to-back interviews. Each of these interviews involved a Director or VP and a DevOps individual contributor. I was really impressed by the relaxed vibe and how they communicated their current DevOps setup and challenges in a straightforward yet comfortable way. It felt like a good place to work with interesting tasks. It looked like they would have made an offer, but I was going through a recruiter, and they knew I was more interested in a management role elsewhere; if that hadn't worked out, Root would have been my second choice.

The interview started with a phone screening where a recruiter discussed the company's history and asked about my background, reasons for seeking new employment, and conflict resolution skills. Following that, I met with the hiring manager and the team for a three-part interview. The first part involved meeting two team members to assess personality fit. The second part was a technical assessment where I was given problem-solving questions to evaluate my technical skills, ability to perform under pressure, and innovative thinking. The final part was with the hiring manager, who inquired about the skills I could contribute to enhance the team. Although I didn't get an offer due to not possessing all the desired skills, I was impressed by the company and their interview process.

A month after I applied, I got a call for a phone interview. It was mostly HR stuff, asking about my background and work history. A few days later, I had another interview where I talked with two team members about more technical things. A week after that, they said they wanted to move forward and would send me a technical and problem-solving skills challenge. It took almost two weeks to get the challenge, and the questions were confusingly worded, so just answering them wasn't enough. They initially said they wouldn't proceed because my answers lacked 'support and reasoning.' I explained I could provide more, so they let me resubmit. After they reviewed my resubmission, which took a couple of weeks, I was told I'd have two more phone interviews. I had one, but it covered the same ground as before, and they didn't even bring up my challenge submission. The second phone interview never happened, but I was told the two people who were supposed to call me liked talking to me, which was weird because I only spoke to one of them. Then they invited me for an in-person interview. The in-person part started off strangely because of some bad info I got, but it went okay overall. Three different groups interviewed me on various topics. In the first interview, some questions were like the ones from the skills challenge, and when I mentioned it, they acted like they'd never heard of it. The challenge, which they apparently thought was important, was never brought up by anyone at the company during my visit, not even the person who gave it to me. Even though the job description said experiment design was part of the role, no one could tell me what it involved or what kind of experiments we'd do. I had to prepare a 45-minute presentation beforehand, which seemed excessive just to check my presentation skills and ability to answer questions, which could be done in 15 minutes. I only got two questions during my presentation, and one interviewer was mostly on his phone. After I finished, instead of any acknowledgment, everyone just left the room. I wasn't sure what to do, so I walked out and was quietly shown the exit with a 'Have a nice flight home.' It was really bizarre. A week later, I got a short email saying they weren't moving forward, which felt like it 'lacked support and reasoning.' There were a lot of odd things happening with this company during my interview process, but I can't go into detail because it apparently got my last review taken down. I've had to leave out a lot of crucial info about interviewing with RootMetrics, so you'll have to find out for yourself. It seems like communication is bad there, nobody knows what anyone else knows, and they're pretty careless about everything except their research. Everything was pretty good up to and including the data challenge, which was a bit weird but not a major concern. Almost everything after that was a series of strange events that seemed like a pattern rather than isolated incidents. They might be okay to work for, but the interview process is not.

This was a super fast and professional process. I was on a tight schedule and they were really flexible. To start, I had a chat about my experience and the role with someone from the team. Since I'm local, they then had me come in for an hour-long technical interview with the team I'd potentially join. It involved some basic SQL and then problems like finding quick paths on big graphs. This wasn't quite what I expected for a data science role, but it really felt like they wanted creative technical problem-solvers, not necessarily ML specialists. The following week, I came back for a full 5-hour on-site, which consisted of several panel interviews with people from various analytics teams. The questions were all over the place, covering sampling methods, how complex computations are, showing data visually, standard statistical reasoning, and some behavioral stuff. I liked how quickly everything moved and that they brought me on-site early. I also appreciated the focus on problem-solving over specific tools or techniques like ML. It was a bummer I didn't get the offer.