I felt sick to my stomach reading some of the reviews below citing Flatiron School recruiters really buttering up interviewees and then going totally cold on them.
I was cold approached about the role of data science coach for the London campus by a lady called Andrea Ahan, who found me via LinkedIn. She was exceedingly friendly in our initial phone call and made me feel as though I had a real shot at the role, based on my experience. She asked about my salary expectations for the role, to which I responded £30k, which is about in line with what I'd expect based on the basis that I've recently graduated, with just a 2 month internship under my belt. She responded with 'How does £45k sound?' which was obviously quite a tantalising prospect for me. We had a short verbal, technical quiz which admittedly I could have performed better in. Nonetheless, she told me I'd have a video interview with her colleague Danielle Gruskiewicz, which would take place over Zoom, where she'd share her screen displaying a Jupyter Notebook containing some Python code implementing a machine learning model. I spent the 2 1/2 days leading up to this interview studying voraciously (which is a huge net positive in spite of the fact I never got a response on this role).
On the day, somebody called Andy turned up on the call instead. He explained he was the lead instructor of the data science program in their Washington DC school. He was friendly and we quickly proceeded to the assessment task. I spent half an hour attempting to debug a linear regression task, whilst role-playing putting myself in the role of coach and him as student. Due to the unfamiliarity of the machine learning library used, I wasn't able to completely debug the problem in time, however I did correct some issues in the code, demonstrated to Andy how he could derive the most benefit from using the notebook, including shortcuts and accessing documentation, I gave him a heads-up on linear regression and I talked confidently around Python in general. Overall, I think I did very well and showed the sort of capabilities that would be expected of me in the role, including posing questions to him to ensure his understanding. He told me I could expect to hear back no later than Wednesday of this week. It is currently Thursday and I appreciate late responses sometimes happen, but it is my gut feeling that they will not be in touch and this has been confirmed by some of the reviews below.
I am not sure what their game is! It seems extremely amateur-like that they would behave in this way to prospective candidates. I have seen many below say that they in most cases recruit from their school's alumni makes sense to me so why even put out the ad in the first place? I would not be surprised if they are using interviewees as lab rats for some purpose which could include visual or speech analysis of interviews to detect emotion amongst other things. I can imagine in particular them recording responses to Andrea's salary proposal, which in hindsight is somewhat unrealistic.
Extremely shady operation. Don't let them waste your time. Stay away!