Stash Interview Questions
& Process

The interviewers were great - smart, thoughtful, and passionate about the work. However, the recruiting experience was really bad. After I gave my availability to reschedule a stakeholder interview, I didn't hear back even after following up. I rearranged my schedule to accommodate their request, and then they just ghosted me. It's unprofessional to ask for someone's time and then disappear without a word. The low Glassdoor rating makes sense.

A recruiter reached out via email, and we had a brief call. Then, a 30-minute call was scheduled to discuss the role and general details. Following that, a technical screening with an FE Developer was set up. I was contacted the same day to arrange an in-person interview, which included four 1-hour sessions. The first 20 minutes of each were behavioral questions, and the last 10 were for my questions. The first session focused on CSS (building a traffic light). The second was architecture design, where I chose to design the Reddit app and a new feature, discussing scalability. The third was a general algorithm question. The fourth was with the CTO, which was surprisingly relaxed, and involved finding the longest sum of numbers in a list. I received an offer the next morning.

Typical tech interview. First, an introductory phone call, then a coding test, followed by a final interview with technical questions and white-boarding. Everyone was nice and the process was pretty standard. My only complaints are about how they told me they were proceeding with other candidates. They felt the need to do this over the phone, which caused me to rearrange my schedule for an awkward phone call when an email would have been sufficient in my opinion. Perhaps they thought it was a courtesy and a chance to give feedback, but I think a phone number in the email if a candidate wanted to discuss the decision further would have been better. Also, HR told me the team valued testing (unit test and TDD), but said it was fine if I didn't have experience with it. I mentioned that at my current job, testing and TDD weren't done, so I didn't have much day-to-day practice. However, the only feedback I received when they decided to pass was that I needed more experience with TDD. This made me feel like I could have been eliminated much earlier and that TDD experience, presented as a nice-to-have, was actually a must-have. This would have saved time for myself and them, as the coding test is quite involved and the final interview is about 3-4 hours.

I had a screening call with HR who was great and kept in-touch. Then, I did a homework assignment. After that, I had 1-on-1 interviews with three team members. The on-site interviews focused on my past projects. I was asked two technical questions. One was how to approach a problem the DS team recently tackled, asked by a non-data science team member. The other was about my pandas knowledge, followed by a white boarding problem, and the interviewer did not review my submitted code. Even though I have a lot of data analytics experience and my background is much stronger than any undergrad, I did not get an offer. I suspect age bias and/or not being a cultural fit. The biggest disappointment was the time and effort spent on the assignment. I would have preferred a more technical and in-depth discussion about relevant projects. Good luck to all others!