1. Call with the Hiring Manager
2. Take Home Assignment
3. Live Assessment
The first step was to meet the hiring manager, they said this was because they thought candidates would have questions that only HM can answer and not the recruiter.
Then I got the home assignment which was lengthy - the first part was to answer to a customer's inquiry, for the second part you're given data to analyze and to come up with ways to improve the CSAT.
Afterwards, if you pass you're given some materials to prepare for the live assesment, 1 SQL question, 3 API questions. I prepared for a week and unfortunately I estimeed Stripe higher than they actually were at this steps. I prepared for ifferent scenarios where I would have to analyze the API response and best on that think what has gone wrong and how to help the customer. For example, if the create payment intent shows incomplete - what can be the reasosn for it and based on those reasons how to troubleshoot and help the customer such as they might need further verification ro their card declined - what would the reasons be and how to fix that. - So, I think because I'm a problem solver by nature I went way too deep into preparing for this steps however, the real assesment was so stupid and easy that I totally was shocked and couldn;t get myself together. They're literally asking you to look at the API and find what's written wrongly there - they don't want you to write down anything, they want you to go to the API references, find an example and copy paste it - for example if the API says currency: us_dollar - you gotta find Stripe's format for us_dollar which is usd. During the assesment, I told the interviewer that I remember that point because I went over the docs so many times - but he told me to go and actually show him an example. Also for the last excercise what's crazy is that I literally coded myself what they wanted, but the interviewer kept pushing me to go and find the exact example on the docs. Basically, they aren't looking for anyone who has problem-solving skills or is smart (apologies to anyone who's working at the company but this step was assessing how well you can be a robot and find things out on the docs which I believe isn't a skill - you literally get used to the information you read for a week and through practice you get used to it and find info easier - but you can't teach someone to code or have problem solving skills. I think this is the reason why their CS department is so hated because the emloyees are requested to be like robots and reply to customers with only the information that is written on the documents. Rather than fully understand their inquiry and solve their issues.
That being said, if you expect that your problem-solving skills will be assessed on the 3rd interview, that's not the case, if you really want to make it pass this step, prepare to find errors on API requests rather than solve any issues or prepare for any situation assessment.
Never could I have imagined such a horrible process from a company like Stripe. I understand that adhering to the documents is important since Stripe is dealing with lots of payments/money-like inquiries - but you guys are assessing the wrong "skills" during your interviews. Again, finding information on the docs isn't a skill - don't hire mediocre employees who can't solve problems but can stick to documents. That's why the reviews of your CS department are so horrible and that's why you're now asking questions about departmental process optimizations and improvements because whoever you hired before this can't do anything but read through documents...
The last instance that I will bring up will be how unhelfpul and unprofessional the interviewer of the live assesment was. He either deliberately is trying to confuse you or he lacks knowledge. During one of the excercises one fo the parameters should ahve been true instead of false - I wasn't able to find it on the document, but I explained that if the customer wants to do this then this paramter should be true, - he kept pushing me to find it on the doc, but since i couldn't he "tried to help me" by asking what's the opposite of false - I said true, he said no, - so we went forth and back multiple times and I was so confused and thought ok maybe the format for these parameters at stripe is Yes/No so I tried that too - again he said no what's the opposite of false, and eventually the answer was true - and I barely kept a poker face and kept it professional and said ok there must have been a misunderstanding.
My advice would be to have this interviewer record the session for other's review later on as well - or have other colleagues join the interview as well - because this guy doesn't seem to know what he's doing and yet many candidates fail because of his feedback and I'm not the only who pointed this out, so there must be a reason, dear Stripe.