First round is a hiring manager round. Initially the HM seemed nice and spoke in detail about the role and asked relevant details about my prior experience. Then, he sends a take-home assignment which is extremely ambiguous and requires data collection, data preprocessing and ML algorithm formulation. I spend close to 5 days non-stop working on the take-home assignment only for Public Storage to send back a reply. saying your application has been cancelled. To potential candidates, please do not join/entertain this company unless you want to do free labor for incompetent people who don't care a cent about the hard work you keep in the take-home. If you get a callback, please be firm in rejecting a take-home assessment unless you get a confirmation that your take-home will be assessed.

They are PHISHING YOUR IDEAS. They do not need new data scientists. They are overstaffed and look for novel solutions rather than employees. They give you a take-home data challenge. They tell you to finish in 48 hours (over your weekend). However, they "allow" you to take more time so you can prepare a better solution for them. I pulled multiple external data sources, explored and evaluated a few modeling approaches, built multiple machine learning models, and came up with detailed investment recommendations. I received a rejection email a month later. No feedback. The job posting is still there. Don't waste your time. Don't feed them your ideas for free. They will just take your code, utilize your findings and keep phishing from other candidates.