ITriedThis

Thank you for the nice response.

I may have used too harsh a tone in my earlier message, so I apologize if you felt attacked.

If you are tracking HN referrals with a special URL, you wouldn't have known I came from HN. I found your site and the Careers link from a Hacker News post that was not a hiring advertisement. Maybe you could allow people to self-identify their affiliation instead.

Unfortunately, I see no benefit I might gain by reaching out to you directly. I have posted a negative review of your company's hiring process in a public forum. If I was interested in applying for your current or future openings, that probably wouldn't help my case.

I'm happy to have helped identify any issues with your process, and again apologize for the tone in my previous post.

Several months ago I tried their hiring process for a position not listed here.

Hopefully this can help guide anyone interested in applying. You can have an idea of what to expect.

Basic timeline:

  Day  0 - Saw advertisement on Who is Hiring thread
  Day  2 - Applied via an application form that asked
           me for some personal information and to complete
           two tasks. I had to send a POST request containing
           some specified information and write a bash script
           to process some data.
  Day 12 - Saw HN frontpage ad for same position and decided
           to send the same application materials again.
  Day 16 - Response from a human who explained they were working
           on other roles for the last 15 days and now they
           were finally ready to look at applications for the
           role I applied to. Asked if I would take a 60 minute
           HackerRank assessment. I agreed to try it.
  Day 17 - HackerRank assessment available for 2 weeks. Message
           explaining a 2-3 week timeline from that point until
           possible offer.  Steps listed included:
             1) HR assessment
             2) phone call
             3) take home project
             4) 2 technical phone calls
             5) background & reference check, meet team
             6) offer
  Day 25 - I completed the HackerRank assessment.
  Day 31 - Response that the position had been filled but they
           were interested in speaking with me for future openings.

Overall it seems pretty typical. I was a bit surprised by how many screening tasks they had. Two just to submit the application, an online timed test, and a take home project seems like quite a lot. No further contact since then, although I haven't been following closely enough to see if they ever posted the same or similar positions again.

This one has left me with a particularly bad impression since they specifically say they take referrals from HN very seriously.

I don't recall being asked if I found out about them from Hacker News (I did), but they did ask me to provide links to LinkedIn, Twitter, StackOverflow, and GitLab/GitHub profiles.

Here's the grand sum of response so far, I think I've waited as long as is reasonable to share. It's been well over a month. No other contact.

  Thanks for your interest in Kaggle. This is
  an automated message from Kaggle's applicant
  tracking system to confirm that we have
  received your application and will review
  it in the next seven days.

Don't promise anything about 'seven days' if you aren't going to at least respond with an automated email saying you threw the application out after a quick glance.

This one seemed interesting so I gave it a bit of effort. The ad is well written and pulls the right levers. Well done on that front.

I'm a bit disappointed in the challenges page. The copy on the site tries to emphasize how difficult they are and that anyone who passes the challenges would be considered a serious candidate. While they were fun challenges, they're way too easy.

I completed multiple challenges then sent along my information. As soon as they saw a resume that didn't include much experience in the security domain, I was basically ignored.

Recommendations for Praetorian:

If you want the challenges to mean anything, make them more significant so that completion would actually be a strong positive signal for the candidate rather than a BS-detector. If someone passes your challenges, you should be begging them to work for you, not the other way around.

Cut back a bit on the elitist rhetoric, it is a bit of a turn-off. I think it will attract more mediocrity and scare away some great talent.

Final word: the challenges are fun for anyone and if you like that kind of thing, you will enjoy beating them.

Filled out one of the applications a while ago to see what would happen. Got back an email confirming my submission. No further contact (yet).

Was hoping to at least get something from a human.

For me, the paid work day was 8 hours in a Slack chat asking a lot of questions of 1-2 employees. My task was to get familiar with their existing systems by querying these employees. I was asked to prepare a report about what I found.

The guys seemed busy so for a lot of the day I was on my own, waiting for more information.

It was intense, but by the end of the day I had a pretty good sense of the internals. I think it was a good test overall.

Anonymous review:

I tried this process because it sounded pretty fun and unique.

One warning I have for anyone interested is that there are some big waiting times involved. I'll share my timeline. Some of the lags were on my end, but I was assured I had as much time as I needed.

  - Day 0-6 - First contact
  - Day 7 - Assigned work sample
  - Day 21 - Submitted work sample
  - Day 62 - Work sample results returned
  - Day 72 - Paid work day
  - Day 79 - Work day report completed
  - Day 85 - Final decision

Overall there were 21 days where they were waiting on me and 47 days where I was waiting on them. This seemed to me like a lot of waiting but maybe it is normal.

I probably worked 15 hours on the work sample, 8 hours on the work day, and 8 more hours putting together the report after the work day.