8y
Hi there!
First, thank you so much for sending your feedback on your experience at Stash! We continuously benchmark our process and tweak it as needed, so your words are helpful in ensuring that we are putting our candidates through a thoughtful and challenging set of meetings.
I definitely understand the disappointment seeing as though you truly committed time to the assignment--THANK YOU! That said, we have to ensure that the process is rigorous and that it makes sense to bring each candidate in. We do our absolute best to only bring candidates in that can get through our assignment in 2-4 hours, but we can always improve as we have no desire to waste anyone's time. I did speak to our VP of Data Science as your notes around the interview not being technical was concerning. She confirmed that the interview is much more focused on understanding thought process, grasp of concepts, decision making and technical prowess based on the assignment, then quizzing candidates face-to-face. Additionally, she assured me that we don't ask candidates if they know Pandas, as knowing Pandas is absolutely NOT essential to joining that team. She mentioned that the question you were referring to is a general data manipulation question, so again, it appears there may have been some sort of miscommunication.
I do have to speak to the mention of "age bias" and "culture fit" as a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion is at the core of everything we do at Stash. In fact, the words "culture fit" have been blacklisted throughout our org entirely. The notion of "culture fit" and judging candidates against an arbitrary set of personality traits can lead to homogeneous organizations, and that would simply not make sense if you look at the people we are building products for. We have a very strong mix of people from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, socio-economic status, experiences, genders, races, ages, religions and sexual orientation, and it is something we are incredibly proud of. In Engineering and Data Science alone, we are: 25% women, 49% people of color, over 8 nationalities, range in age from 22 to 50, and have grown up in vastly different household income brackets. Lastly, we have several current university seniors (who graduate this month) joining us full time next month, so I can assure you that we have a range of experience levels as well. We can ALWAYS do better here and we are wholeheartedly committed to increasing these numbers as we move forward! This is all to say that while I definitely appreciate your feedback, I want to make sure that we assert the facts.
At the end of the day, I truly hope you find a role that makes sense for you and I want you to know that we deeply appreciate your time and hard work. Please do not remain a stranger, we have nothing but respect for the people who come in to spend time with us! Best of luck in your search!
Natalie Ledbetter
Stash Invest
VP of People Operations
