I had a phone screen with the hiring manager and a 2 hour on-site - an office tour and a series of 1:1 conversations with 4 team members. 3/4 people were not in the office to meet me, after paying to rent a car and driving to Mountain View in rush hour traffic from where I live in Oakland. I interviewed with 1 person in person at the on site, and the rest were on Google Hangouts, which was frustrating. The team did very little to get to know me as a person and seemed only concerned with results and past experience. I felt the hiring manager expressed negative bias towards my experience working at a bootcamp, which was surprising given Udacity's core student demographic is career switchers, just like bootcamps ("when we've interviewed people from bootcamps before..." insert limiting belief here). Like many edtech companies serving adults, they have underutilized and underappreciated their alumni, but seem to be making a concerted effort to do more for their alumni now. I asked about their beliefs on diversity, inclusion, and equity in the company and their answer was everyone on staff has a strong sense of ethics and what's right. I take that as no one has thought to care, that identity doesn't matter internally, and they have other priorities. I saw only white and Asian people in their office, so certainly there is work to do. When asked about how they will distribute the 50,000 scholarships from Google in a fair and effective manner in order to address important social justice issues in tech, there was little depth or process to the response. I was disappointed they have no diversity and inclusion efforts internally, and that there's seemingly little information available to staff or the public about how 50,000 scholarships might be distributed. Their office looked really beautiful online and was mediocre and a bit messy in person. Overall, I expected more from a company that seems to have strong values, a seemingly amazing team, and broad impact. I left feeling like they're operating just like any other consumer-facing Internet startup in the Bay Area, have little impact and engagement with most of their thousands and thousands of students, and are in over their head trying to figure out how to do something meaningful with their community. I still have tremendous respect for how many students they serve and the innovation they have driven in their curriculum and how it's delivered, but the areas of their business where I thought they might differentiate themselves in the edtech space were sparse and lacking.
