I went through a recruiter. I thought the process showed a lack of respect for candidate's time, which after reading the employee reviews for this company, raised a number of additional red flags in my mind about what working here could be like. For instance, a couple weeks after the third party recruiter told me I would be talking to somebody from Lab49, I finally got a call from one of their internal HR screeners. She was friendly enough, but at the end of the call, she told me the next step would be to do a take home coding assignment, which I would have 2 days to complete. It should only take a couple hours, supposedly. Well, the coding assignment was very open ended. It involved looking at a time series data set covering years of data for thousands of companies, with thousands of nulls. We were expected to build a model to forecast this into the future. Well obviously with an open ended question like that, a real data scientist could spend weeks working it. Given two days, it's hard to believe anyone only works on this for a couple hours and turns it in. There is no way that anyone would create anything worth even looking at in just a couple hours with this data. As is, I spent a solid day on it, and even still, I only got one model really working / trained after spending so long crawling over the data. Ok, so whatever.. we get these sorts of challenges all the time. I get it. But the problem here it wasn't until the next step that I actually got to speak with somebody in the department I would be joining. This was the 'fit' call. I got the vibe that he barely even looked at the jupyter notebook I wrote, which represented hours of my time. And he spent almost of his time on the call telling me how the work they do is really uninteresting, and nothing they do is cutting edge... why would I want to work there? This whole time I'm thinking... gosh this woulda been nice to know before I wasted a over day of my life on this assignment they gave me. And then, to make matters worse, I was told the next step would be ANOTHER CODING CHALLENGE! I was sent a link to an online assessment that would expire in one week. Upon clicking it, I was told I couldn't use any reference material beyond the standard help files for python or whatever. There were 11 questions. 8 of them were just basic data structure type questions, though honestly I thought they were a huge waste of time. They were easy, but finding the right syntax using just the python help docs for functions I rarely use was just a pain, and highly doubt most people even bother. Most likely just look at stackoverflow, kinda like how you would in the real world. But the last 3 questions (marked optional) were ridiculous. There's no way anyone could answer those using just the python help docs, at least within the time limit. Anyone who makes it through this stage must have "cheated" by using non-standard resources, though honestly I think the restriction was dumb to begin with, and the stuff they tested for didn't have much to do with machine learning or time series analysis anyway. The first coding challenge did, but again I don't think they even bothered looking at what I did for that, prefering instead to just use this automated testing system. I got the first 8 questions to correctly submit within 30 minutes of the allotted 3 hours, but the last 3 questions I couldn't get in the next 2.5 hours. If I'd felt comfortable "cheating" and looking stuff up online, I probably could have done at least one, but as is my solutions didn't pass the use case tests, and I didn't make it to the next stage, which (supposedly) would actually have been onsite, and I'm sure, also included additional coding challenge. This whole process was drawn out over the course of about 2 months. I would highly recommend not even bothering starting down the road unless you're exceptionally desperate for a job. It's a very tedious, time consuming process, and from what I could gather, the "gold" at the end of the rainbow here is buried in a mound of something awful. This interview process, to me, reflects very poorly on their management and general processes. It unfortunately affirmed a lot of what I'd been reading about Lab49 since their acquisition by ION.