Human Diagnosis Project Software Engineer, Backend interview questions

1. Meet with manager for coffee for a first look-see. Pleasant morning coffee that identified mutual interest. 2. Read and comment on the philosophy Appealing well thought out ideal philosophy. I was particularly attracted to the "pariter," walking together aspect. My read of the philosophy is to filter out libertarian techies. But after the interview, I suspected it might be to give libertarian managers plausible deniability. 3. Work product programming assignment Pleasant little graph traversal problem. I asked for an accommodation for a learning disability, and they granted me some more time to consider the problem. I implemented the solution with tests. Interviewers commented favorably on the quality of my work product. 4. On-site interview This is where it got really strange. The compact East Mission office facility has a California zen feeling to it. It was so quiet and calm, stark and unadorned, that I'd imagine I'd fall asleep working there or slip and fall on all of the polished concrete. First was lunch with the company, very pleasant. Then I was brought in for two tech interviews and then a system design problem. All onsite tests offered up no disability accommodations in contrast to the take home task, no time to compensate for my learning disability. Both of the tech interviews shared the same characteristics: the interviewers were all relatively recent hires, none longer than a year. In both cases, the setup was unclear. The first tech challenge was an enhancement to the python heapq I used to implement Dijkstra's for the take home. But the interviewer did not contextualize where he was going as he began to explain the data structure. He just started talking about a data structure enhancement with no context to grab onto. So it was not clear until he asked me to reason in the system he just described what he was getting at. If you want someone with a learning disability to fail, this is how to do it. The second tech test was similarly mis-presented. The take away was unclearly stated problems with no clear ask for work product all done on a dry erase board that was positioned so that it was physically challenging to write on. During this, I read their body language and began to feel insulted and to ask myself whether I indeed wanted to work with these people. By time time I got to the systems design task, an outline of a URL shortener, again, with no advance heads up, no accommodation, i was getting stressed and it was clear to me that the philosophy was an ideal that was not necessarily faithfully reproduced for practical use. I felt walked over, ambushed, my disability dismissed by a firm in the health space with a flowery philosophy, rather than walked with, pariter. I sent the perfunctory 2 sentence version of a thank you email which was responded to rapidly in kind. The day after that, I read that Google had disclosed a similar AI/ML based learning system for diagnosing human pathologies.