Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2018)

Prodo.AI | London, UK | Full-time | ONSITE or REMOTE

Humans spend too much time writing code for machines. We make machines write code for humans.

Prodo.AI are hiring people to solve hard problems in Machine Learning for Programming. We're looking for:

- AI/ML research scientists to apply deep learning to code — https://prodo.ai/research (on-site) - data engineers, to create data pipelines and tooling to analyse large volumes of code — https://prodo.ai/data (on-site) - software developers to work on our product and productionise ML — https://prodo.ai/dev (on-site or remote)

Why us?

- work with smart machines and nice people - exciting mission, with a positive impact - freedom to work on your own creative ideas - inclusive and empowering working environment - flexible hours and flexible work style - safe place to learn and experiment without blame - close synergy between research and engineering - support and mentorship from respected experts - generous compensation, salary and equity - based in the heart of London, UK

More details at https://prodo.ai/jobs. Email us at jobs@prodo.ai. Come join us.

I don't recommend anyone to send their resume to this company, I recently applied with this company and they sent me a coding challenge.

In the coding challenge they said I had 90 minutes to solve a programming puzzle, the puzzle was to implement Rule 110 cellular automaton as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

In their email they said:

"Please remember that the goal is not to finish, but to write code that best represents you to us. It’s OK if you only get half-way through."

After writing the code and sending it to them they said:

"Thanks for completing our test. Unfortunately, the codebase wasn’t of a sufficient standard for us to proceed. Specifically, we observed bugs in processing the edges of the matrix, it didn’t use the command-line arguments, and it didn’t quite meet the specification. Thank you very much for applying to Prodo.AI. I hope the challenge was interesting, and I wish you the best of luck in your job search."

I asked why they kept contradicting themselves, and they said:

"I apologise for the confusing wording. I have no issue with you not finishing the task completely, but rather that your instructions for running the code did not match the code itself, which implied bugs or misreading, rather than not finishing. You code also explicitly contradicts the specification in one or two places. I’m sorry we disappointed you. Thank you again for completing the exercise, and best of luck in the future."

So first they said the code doesn't have to be perfect, they also claim their environment is blame-free, yet they blame me for misspelling the name of a file.

I don't think I need to explain how ridiculous this is or how angry I am, these companies don't have any respect for candidate's time and I feel stupid for applying with them, I don't recommend this company to anyone.