I was contacted by HR via LinkedIn to interview with Carta. After the first phone screen with HR, the recruiter's communication dropped off completely.

I ended up reaching out directly to the hiring manager and the director of engineering to reiterate my enthusiasm for the open role.

HR then got back to me right away and said they had already filled the role, but might have another headcount available.

After that, I had a 45-minute interview with a different hiring manager. The interview went well, even though I was seeing a lot of red flags with the company.

The hiring manager seemed pretty stressed and unhappy during the interview and described the work at Carta as quite chaotic. I emphasized that I really cared about company culture, but the hiring manager didn't really have anything to say about it when I asked.

Another red flag for me was seeing on Google, during June 2023, that a former female executive was suing Carta for gender discrimination (you can Google it). That was another HUGE red flag for me, as I am a woman of color.

After the interview, Carta sent me a take-home assignment. I completed it in Node.js because that is the language I know best. I believe I did fine on the assignment and should have been called back for a full-length interview. I did everything that was asked, adhered to SOLID principles, optimized my code with a Big O of O(n log n), and had thoughtful reasoning and ways to extend my program if given more time.

Ultimately, Carta decided not to move forward with my candidacy.

Reflecting on the interview with the hiring manager, he seemed to want someone who knew Python well and could hit the ground running. I don't know Python very well, but I'm sure I could have learned it quickly. The take-home assignment specifically claims they don't care about language, so I didn't think it was a mistake to go with Node. I don't think that's true, though.

My sense from talking to the hiring manager was that they had layoffs semi-recently and were having a lot of issues with their current customers.

I emailed the hiring manager politely asking for feedback on the take-home assignment and recommendations on where I could improve my skills. He responded by saying they had already filled the position on his team before I was assigned my take-home assignment.

I'm not sure why they had me do a take-home assignment if they probably weren't going to fill the role or had another headcount.

I feel like Carta really wasted my time as an interviewee.

Read a CSV file and output some math-related logic.