Thumbtack Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

This was possibly the worst candidate experience I’ve had. The recruiter was 10 minutes late to our initial call without any warning, forcing me to email her. After I passed the technical interview, there was a long period of silence until I reached out again. At that point, they suggested a different and significantly more junior role. I specifically asked for a more senior role similar to the one I originally applied for, and they provided it – which makes me wonder why they didn’t suggest it initially. I expressed my interest, and again, there was radio silence until I contacted them. At various times, the recruiter also just stated they would call on a specific day without checking my availability.

The interview process wasn't hard, but it was a little weird. First it was the average recruiter call with questions about my experience and info about the role. After, it was the SQL assessment. Usually they would give you a take home assignment, but they changed to a live coding session. At first I thought that was good because I could display my SQL skills better. I am not a SQL master but recently I passed the SQL technical interview for Meta, Spotify, and Intuit so I know I have enough. However, the live coding session was very bad and that's where I didn't move forward in the interview process. Each company has their own way of evaluating candidates, but Thumbtack does their SQL assessment in a very strange way that, in my opinion, doesn't really show your problem solving skills through SQL. The interview started with VERY FAST introductions. I had no chance to talk about my experience, my work, and what I know. We went straight to Hacker Rank. The live coding session was 3 questions. They were pretty basic questions (make sure you know window functions). However, during the live session the interviewer stayed quiet the whole time and didn't really know what was going on. I was expecting some type of collaboration or discussion about the way we could calculate the asked metric, but it looks like they were just looking for the specific right answer (which I think it's not effective). I solved the first 2 questions, but then got stuck in the 3rd question. I actually thought I had a pretty creative way to solve the 3rd one, but I wasn't getting the specific right answer they were looking. I started explaining to the interviewer, but they just said "I don't understand what you are doing" and I could tell they just wanted the answer they were looking for. When the interview ended, I had no time to ask questions or discuss about the role. Completely understand their decision, but I think they are loosing good talent that actually understands product analytics because of the narrow-minded SQL assessment.

First, there was an email phone screen with the recruiter where they asked about my background, education, and career goals. Then, I had a take-home data analysis task to complete and submit by the next day. The instructions for the challenge were a little unclear, so I interpreted it as an open-ended analysis of the dataset, offering what I thought were some insightful findings. However, I suspect they were actually looking for a more specific analysis of a particular trend. Although I didn't get an onsite interview, they did give me some helpful feedback on how I did with the challenge.