I was contacted by an external recruiter who did the initial screening. The following call was with an HR person who ask me few general questions. After that, they asked me to complete an assignment via Github, which I was reluctant to do given how these have proven to be immense waste of times in the past. So as a compromise, they offered to have me get on the phone with the director of Data Science first to answer any questions I might have about the role. The call went well, and he assured me that I shouldn't spend more than 2-3 hours on the assignment, so I decided to give it a shot. The assignment was a typical unsupervised learning problem, the goal of the assignment was to analyze a dataset of radiology providers with a breakdown of services that they provided and figure out a way to automatically identify "specialties" for the providers. Took me maybe 8-9 hours to complete, and it could have probably taken much longer than that due to how open-ended it was. After submitting the assignment, I had a call with the Chief of Product and Chief of People. It was honestly a bit awkward since they spent most of the time lobbying behavioral interview questions at me without giving me much information about the company or what they were looking for this role. A few days later they sent out an email saying I was no longer under consideration.

- Phone screen with recruiter (15m) - Video chat with hiring manager (1hr) - Take home assignment sent during the weekend, <24h before it was due (4-5hr) - Video chat with people ops (30m) - Video Practicum with hiring manager and a couple of team leads (2h) Take home was absurdly vague and broad to the point that it felt as though they weren’t sure what this position was even meant to focus on. Practicum was strangely adversarial, and I found myself on the defensive in responding to questions that shouldn’t really have a wrong or right answer. The team had little understanding of how their work factored into the final “product”, and seemed not to care to learn what drives the business as a whole. Their holier than thou attitude belied a fundamental lack of experience in healthcare, and their inability to think outside the box will ultimately be their downfall. This isn’t academia, kids—you’re not special, and if you’re not helping the bottom line, you won’t be around for long.