I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Insight M in Mar 2023
Interview
An hour call with the staffer (they actually ghosted me on our first scheduled call and had to reschedule), then a beefy take-home coding challenge followed by five separate one-hour sessions with team members, manager, and CTO. Sessions included behavioral, background, and a few technical questions. One session was to go over the take home challenge answer. After passing the take-home challenge (which I believe is accidentally set up in a way that it is impossible to fully complete - more below) I was immediately scheduled for the five sessions and completed them all. The entire time I felt like things were going really well. Conversation flowed smoothly and I was getting on great with folks (smiles, laughs, nods). They seemed happy with my answers. My ten year background in scientific and back end computing was a wonderful fit for this role. Despite all that I was rejected with zero feedback. All told I probably put 20 unpaid hours into this process and did a great job. I highly resent receiving no feedback whatsoever. It was insulting and demoralizing. Also they don't mention in their job description that there is an on-call component to this role. They said the weekly on-call is shared among ~13 staff so you won't be on call often. But one of them let slip that actually the number of staff who are responsible for on call will be reduced so a smaller number of staff (including this role) would carry a higher load while the others are freed to work on other stuff. Staff mentioned having to work all day on the weekend or be up at 10pm. This is due to a fragile data pipeline that needs to be babysat.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a log parsing application which keeps a count of valid and invalid logs according to a standard format. This is done in a GitLab module and deploys to a "canary" environment which runs a bunch of tests on our output that you can't see. If a test fails you get a vague one-line "hint". If you pass the canary tests you are promoted to "production" which runs more tests.
It was helpful to get this review. Thank you. We never want any of our candidates to feel unappreciated, truly. Your time is valuable. We know that, and we are grateful to the people who put effort into engaging with us. It was upsetting to hear that any candidate would feel this way, and we definitely made some mistakes along the way if a great engineer we were hoping we might hire in the future came away with such a negative impression.
I'm glad we were able to connect via phone and chat about this. It caused us to explore our processes and make adjustments, so your feedback was a gift. I'm glad you remain open to re-engaging with us in the future as we build out our software team. We know you'd make a solid addition to Kairos. Thanks again for sharing your experience and being receptive to my call. Feel free to reach out to Justin or me anytime!
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