SoundCloud is rebuilding after almost going bankrupt and laying off half of their employees. This is painfully clear in their disorganized interview process. They have no integrity or respect for their candidates' time. The coding challenge seems an attempt for the Data Science division to field new approaches to SoundCloud's problems of decreased user engagement, increased track skipping, and insufficient mobile downloads, and for free.
I did a phone screen with SoundCloud HR. We spoke about future steps and my hesitancy to spend a long time on their unpaid coding challenge on company data. I don't spend more than 4-8 hours on unpaid coding challenges; it's unethical to expect so much free work from candidates. When those challenges are on company data, that work can be considered productive labor. It's illegal to assign productive labor without providing compensation. She assured me that I could limit my time on the coding challenge to around ~8 hours. She sent me the coding challenge and asked me to return it within a week.
I spent around 12 hours on it in. They took 2 weeks to get back to me with a request to reformat my notebook. But then the HR rep said the original format was ok. She took an additional 2 weeks to get back to me with feedback on my challenge. I waited 4 weeks to get feedback on my assignment.
The feedback on my coding challenge was ludicrous. There were multiple penalizations for not providing annotation, even though I clearly annotated every block of code and provided paragraphs explaining what I was doing and why.
I was penalized for answering some of the questions in the challenge as they were written in the challenge. One question was: "For a user X, recommend 5 playlists they would like that they haven’t heard before. You can attempt this via SQL or any other programming language of your choice. Please explain your logic." I answered the question in SQL. I was told that I "ignored" the question about answering it in another programming language. I told HR that it's ridiculous that I was docked points for answering the question as it was written. I was also penalized for not providing discussion for my answer, even though I wrote a paragraph about what I was doing and why. She said she'd get back to the team with that feedback.
Regarding the SQL part, I was given a schema (no data) and told to write the code in SQL. I used a SQL general dialect pseudocode that I didn't expect to run. Generally, pseudocode is fine when there's no data to test on. It doesn't make sense to attempt writing working code without being provided a SQL dialect and/or actual data, yet I was penalized for my SQL code not running.
In the next part, I was supposed to suggest a method for increasing downloads. I wrote a paragraph and made some suggestions that included, but were not limited to, looking at certain feature correlations. I was told that the only thing I suggested were feature correlations.
In the last question, involving data modeling, I was again told that I didn't provide annotations and notes, even though I annotated every block of code and wrote several paragraphs of explanations. Other potential employers commend my annotations, so it's surprising that SoundCloud claimed that I didn't include them at all.
The third exercise was modeling track skipping. I used a simple definition that I was told that this was "questionable". If they had a definition they wanted me to use, they should have mentioned it instead of penalizing me for my researched definition.
I reminded HR that, in our phone screen, we discussed limiting the time on this assignment to 8 hours. She responded that she never would have said that. She explained what an "intense" assignment it was for a "difficult position" that was "very hard to fill". I asked how long candidates were supposed to spend on it, and she responded that it should take 16-20 hours. That's ludicrous for an unpaid assignment on company data, and was not communicated to me!
She went on to condescend to me that I was making a transition from freelance to full time and I was later in my hiring process so there are definitely other companies that are interested in hiring me. I didn't see how that was pertinent to her miscommunicating the scope of the coding challenge, lying about it after the fact, and the wildly inappropriate feedback from the Data Science team on my assignment.
Clearly, SoundCloud has fundamental problems. Expectations are misrepresented, ill-defined, and lied about. Their assessment was inappropriately time consuming not to mention, exploitative and illegal because it was uncompensated productive labor on company data. The data team didn't accurately review my challenge, or even seem to understand the questions they asked on the challenge. Then, to add insult to injury, their HR person condescended to me about my outside job prospects. Don't waste your time.
