Pager was pretty fast in communicating with me. First I had a phone screen with HR. Then they sent me a really long coding challenge.
The instructions said:
"You will have 7 days to complete this task, but we expect you to spend no more than 3 to 4 hours on it."
Every company says this and they usually don't mean it. If you really want candidates to stop working on it after 3-4 hours, that needs to be explicitly communicated or some will spend extra time to do their best work so they can stand out and get a job. It also needs to be communicated that it's ok to turn in an unfinished rough notebook.
The instructions also said:
"Walk us through your assumptions and thought process, as well as your modeling and tool selection decisions."
The code for the first part of the test took 30 minutes to run by itself! Writing notes and reviewing takes at least another hour. I don't see how, in less than 3 hours, someone's going to write all that code, run it and then make visualizations, annotate and review it, and then finish an *additional* 2-3 questions on a huge, 16GB data set, and all without compensation? It's wildly unrealistic, not to mention, exploitative. Scale back the challenge to something that can be reasonably finished and polished in 3-4 hours or say that you don't expect a polished and annotated finished product.
I was very excited about the job and scope of the startup, so I spent about 12 hours on the challenge and returned a polished notebook with lots of annotations, explanations and charts. I was told by HR that I did a great job! We scheduled an on-site interview for the next week where I got to meet the CEO and Engineering team.
HR said that the interview was more of about culture fit than anything else, and the interview was pretty easy. Everyone was really nice and I felt I got along with everyone and did well. We talked about my coding challenge and they asked more about my background and how I would solve a hypothetical situation at their company related to a cold-start issue they're having.
I got feedback the next morning. HR took a phone call with me to explain that they decided I didn't have enough software engineering experience. There is no software engineering experience on my resume at all! I thought Pager looked at my resume and GitHub and understood what my background and skills were before assigning a long coding challenge and bringing me for a 3-hour onsite. But that was overlooked. HR apologized for that oversight and talked about how "difficult" it is to hire for this role.
The challenge was not a software engineering challenge, but a machine learning modeling challenge on big data. If Pager wants to hire someone with more of a software engineering background, that should have been emphasized more in the coding challenge. They wasted hours of my time when my experience could've been ascertained with a better-targeted job description, resume review, coding challenge or the simple question: "how many years of software engineering experience do you have?"
I didn't talk to a single woman on the engineering team. So hiring technical women doesn't seem to be much of a priority. Other companies will often find at least one technical woman for me to talk to, even if just about culture, to make me feel like they value diverse hiring. This didn't happen at Pager.
Pager's hiring process was just as broken as, if not more so than, every other company I've talked to that disrespects candidates' time, doesn't doesn't hire technical women, doesn't know how to do a resume review and can't write nor define a realistic data science/ML job description.
