7y
At Noom, we have a super transparent culture, and take all feedback very carefully. However, after reviewing the experience of this particular candidate, we found a large number of inaccuracies that we wanted to quickly point out:
1) With regards to the reimbursement, we actually offer every candidate the default option for Noom to book flight and hotel directly to avoid a large upfront interview expense. However, some candidates choose to book their own and get reimbursed for personal reasons (rewards/miles, seat/meal preferences, Date of Birth disclosure by airlines, etc). Unfortunately, because this candidate also wanted to get reimbursed in foreign currency, there was a bit of a delay. We will work to speed this up in the future, but this is a really rare case.
2) The candidate took much longer than normal to do the coding challenge, which we typically expect to only take one or two hours—something that we explicitly communicate when we assign it.
3) Our VP of Engineering (who is the manager referenced in the question) does a behavioral interview to test for culture fit, and we test knowledge of technology like React in a different interview. We don't like to repeat content across interview, and instead try to run a careful structured interview process.
4) We spoke to our President and (Technical) Co-Founder, whose interview is referenced in the feedback. We looked over the feedback, and found the candidate unfortunately did very poorly on the interview -- and it was not a deep algorithmic interview, but rather involved some very basic data structures on a real-life problem. We always strive to provide hints to candidates during the interview when they struggle (to keep going in the problem), and are sorry the candidate found them condescending -- this is the first time we hear this feedback after hundreds of interviews. Rest assured, we don't look for any keywords, but are looking to hear how a candidate approaches a problem. And yes, our Co-Founder likes to interview everyone that is hired, because hiring is extremely critical to the mission of the company, not any less critical than vision!
We hope this helps shed some light on the situation.