Two phone screens and one take-home test:

• The first phone screen was with a very nice recruiter (general questions).
• The second phone screen was with the hiring manager (very general, very easy technical questions applicable to the position).
• The next step was to do Apache Spark homework on a large financial public dataset within three business days.

I rate this experience as negative due to the following reasons:

1. The red flag in my experience is that the technical interviewing team either lacks the skill to narrow down the candidate pool on the phone or is too arrogant/lazy to test interactively during phone screens. Instead, a take-home test was given. Usually, programming homework is a dead end, as there is no interaction or feedback loop like during a normal interview where you can clarify assumptions. You also don't know the criteria for scoring candidates' coding products, if the evaluator has knowledge in the specific methods you have used, or what the reviewer's preferred coding style is, etc. Homework assignments allow companies to scale their candidate screening processes indefinitely without paying a dime. We, fellow engineers, pay the bill big time by doing free work without even knowing if someone even looked at the results.
2. The evaluation process was longer than a week after the results were submitted.
3. Despite a very nice "template" recruiter's response, there was no feedback given on the homework at all.

I understand that these days companies try not to give assessment feedback due to various legal requirements, but no feedback on serious homework discourages candidates from doing any homework that takes more than 30 minutes.

The only reason I agreed to take a homework test for Acorns was that I wanted to demonstrate my knowledge of Spark and its SparkSQL as the most efficient way to compute stats on a large dataset. I think I deserve to at least know under what criteria it was evaluated and if I missed anything.

Advice to the recruitment team: Please, please, please: during the first phone screen, disclose that step #3 will be homework. Candidates who avoid wasting time on unpaid "homework assignments" need to have an opportunity to withdraw themselves from the process early.

Given a public financial big data set going back a few years in history, compute in the most efficient way using the Spark API the following financial instruments for each day: the biggest winner, the highest volume, and the most traded.