Professional team, but the assessment process feels outdated for an AI role Pros: - Respectful Process: The team was professional and organized throughout. - Good Take-Home: The take-home project was fair, well-scoped, and representative of actual work quality. - Feedback: The team offered a feedback call after the rejection (rare and appreciated). Cons: - Artificial Constraints: The live coding environment prohibits modern tools (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, documentation). For an AI-focused company, banning the tools that define modern engineering feels like a missed opportunity to evaluate real world workflow. - Signal Mismatch: There is a disconnect between the take-home and the live rounds. Candidates invest time in a substantial, practical take-home project, yet the hiring decision seems to filter primarily on algorithm recall rather than the engineering skills demonstrated in the work sample. - Outdated Patterns: The live coding optimizes for memorizing specific algorithm patterns rather than the problem-solving or iterative testing used in actual product development. - Industry Comparison: Competitors like Labelbox or Roboflow evaluate via pair programming on real deployment tasks. This process feels closer to generic Big Tech gatekeeping than a modern AI startup assessment. Advice to Management: - Weight the take-home project more heavily. It is a much better indicator of the candidate's actual output than the algorithm rounds. - Update the live coding to reflect modern engineering constraints (i.e., allow AI tools/docs) to see how candidates actually ship code. Advice to Candidates: - Prepare for the Algo Filter: The live coding acts as a hard gatekeeper, even a great take-home won't save you if you fail here. Drill classic LeetCode Medium patterns (especially Matrix/Graph problems) and prioritize this over polishing your project. - Simulate the Constraints: You will be coding without your modern stack (Cursor, Claude, etc.). Practice solving problems in a raw environment without AI or auto-complete to avoid being slowed down by the artificial restrictions.