I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Discord
Interview
My first interview was with a very enthusiastic and nice recruiter. The entire thing lasted about 30 mins and was your basic introductory conversation. The recruiter mentioned several times at how hard it is to get a job on the trust and safety team and to check out the policy section of the site.
The second interview was scheduled with the head of trust and safety, instead I got a random member of the team with no acknowledgment that there had been a change.
The person who did interview me was extremely rude, vague, and aggressive with his questioning style to the point i felt like they were trying to catch me "slipping up". I actually considered hanging up on the person mid interview because the entire thing felt ludicrous, however I forged through and was immediately sent a link to the "test" afterwards.
The "test" was a badly formatted mess. I have added most the questions below.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Last friday I installed Discord because I was invited to a server by somebody from the LOL Boards. We had some great games and understood each other well. Then yesterday I suddenly found myself banned from the server and blocked by my new friends. After some questioning around on the LOL Boards I found out that I supposedly had sent links to scam sites through PMs via discord. I didn’t do that! Is there a possibility to gain access to my entire protocols of what I did on discord since the creation of my account, because such conversations do not appear in my List. What might have happened? What information can I provide? Halp me prove my innocence!
I've come to report someone who is trying to start a competing Discord server that I'm member of. The 2 'originals' servers are : “TheFinalCraft“, “MCHorizons“. A new user didn’t like how we were running things and is maybe copying our servers. Name kinda copy ours, cuz ‘TheFinalCraft’ and ‘El juego FINAL’.
The inherent structure of Discord is one where you have to opt-in to communications — you have to accept a friend requests or share a server with a user for them to DM you. This prevents a lot of harassment, and for the harassment that does happen, Discord offers a lot of self-moderation tools, including blocking users and server moderation levels. Because of this, we may respond to a lot of reports of harassment (‘he called me a bad word!’) by saying ‘please block that user’.
However, when should Discord take action on users reported for harassment? If a user only messages once but it’s incredibly offensive, is that sufficient? How severe should the activity be for us to take action on the user, and how do we measure severity?
If a user violates the Community Guidelines, we’ll take action on that user. If a few users act together to violate the Guidelines (for example, by raiding another server), we’ll take action on those users as a group. But what’s the line between taking action on a user specifically versus taking action on a server as a whole? What are the factors that we should take into account when deciding to punish a user or server, and which one of those are most important? Under what circumstances, if any, do you think we should take action against a 5,000 or 50,000 user server if only 10 or 50 or 100 users are causing trouble? Also, if there’s a server that’s disseminating content in violation of the Community Guidelines, are there times when we should ban all users instead of just those sharing the content?
This was the most rigorous interview process I've ever taken part in. It involved a 1:1 with the recruiter, a take home test, a phone call with someone on the team, then a virtual on-site.
They gave you 3 days to submit your answers to the take home test and it took me about 16 hours total to complete. I'm not sure how anyone would have been able to complete this assignment in 3 days while working full time as it involved researching their current policies, thoroughly reading their community guidelines, and also understanding how their product works on the back end.
Next was the phone call where someone on their team essentially challenges all of your answers to the questions. This was echoed in the on-site interview, where 4 out of the 5 people I spoke to asked my opinion on policies and proceeded to play devil's advocate against whatever I said. I understand the skills that they were looking for but it seemed unnecessary to do so over and over throughout the process.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Discord (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2018
Interview
Overall a good experience. Here is basically the breakdown of the entire process:
- Applied online via Discord website
- Contacted by recruiter to set up a phone interview
- 30 min phone interview with the hiring manager
- 11-12 page take-home assignment containing scenario cases as well as questions about policy
- Contacted by recruiter to set up on-site interview
- 6 hour on-site interview with 5-6 people from varying departments
- Lunch included with 3 people from different deparments
The vibe and culture at Discord is very rich and pure and you can tell that everyone is truly happy to be where they are at, doing what they love. In regards to this position, it sounded like they were looking more for a Community Moderator versus someone with seasoned Trust & Safety experience to really change and challenge their risk model and/or Community Guidelines. Almost every person I spoke to would get off topic to talk about video games. While this was great in terms of a cultural fit, I'm not sure if deterring from the subject matter of my background and skills helped me in this case. Overall, it was a very good experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The ones who did ask me anything was revolving around policy changes.