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Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

tdhopper.com

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Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#21

Post by eanzenberg »

motivic wrote: post #10

This is a bit off-topic but one thing I'm curious is how the author manages to interview with these companies while holding down a full-time job and keep up-to-date with the latest developments. Interview for a data science position is typically a drawn-out process, with multiple rounds of interviews and possibly take-home projects. I found them to be very time and energy consuming. To share my story, I also had a di…

I think being a good DS requires focused learning. For example, when I started out, I didn't know much about neural networks and their different architectures. I tend to find time outside work to go over papers, thesis, or watch lectures on youtube to keep myself up to date so that now I can describe cnn and rnns to tech and non-tech people.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#22

Post by minimaxir »

Many recommend setting up an online portfolio for these types of positions. But I've applied to a number of Data Analyst/Scientist jobs recently and I am immediately rejected almost every time despite highlighting my blog/portfolio (http://minimaxir.com) and my GitHub with open-source code/Notebooks for each and every post (https://github.com/minimaxir), both of which have topped HN on occasion.

Internal recruiters have hinted that my Software QA Engineer background + no CS degree implies I have no technical skill.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#23

Post by EternalData »

minimaxir wrote: post #22

Many recommend setting up an online portfolio for these types of positions. But I've applied to a number of Data Analyst/Scientist jobs recently and I am immediately rejected almost every time despite highlighting my blog/portfolio ( http://minimaxir.com ) and my GitHub with open-source code/Notebooks for each and every post ( https://github.com/minimaxir ), both of which have topped HN on occasion. Internal recruite…

I've seen your posts on Spark. That's sad to hear.

Are you applying online or via getting coffees with people in the data science team and just talking shop? The latter seems to have a high conversion rate if you can nail it.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#24

Post by muninn_ »

minimaxir wrote: post #22

Many recommend setting up an online portfolio for these types of positions. But I've applied to a number of Data Analyst/Scientist jobs recently and I am immediately rejected almost every time despite highlighting my blog/portfolio ( http://minimaxir.com ) and my GitHub with open-source code/Notebooks for each and every post ( https://github.com/minimaxir ), both of which have topped HN on occasion. Internal recruite…

Yeah. The problem is recruiters are almost universally non-technical, so they can't properly gauge your talent nor do they understand the job requirements fully.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#26

Post by dev1n »

minimaxir wrote: post #22

Many recommend setting up an online portfolio for these types of positions. But I've applied to a number of Data Analyst/Scientist jobs recently and I am immediately rejected almost every time despite highlighting my blog/portfolio ( http://minimaxir.com ) and my GitHub with open-source code/Notebooks for each and every post ( https://github.com/minimaxir ), both of which have topped HN on occasion. Internal recruite…

Send the recruiters your Reddit posts in the r/beautifuldata or w/e that subreddit is. I'm sure the recruiters spend a lot of time on Reddit. Recruiters are ridiculous.

edit: spelling

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#27

Post by ska »

dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote: post #20
yummyfajitas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've probably interviewed about 70-100 such people in the past year and a half. Exactly 1 such person was qualified (I hired him). The issue in my view is the following: people who know both statistics and computer science are extremely rare. People who actually understand statistics are rare. I can probably weed out 1/3 to 1/2 of candidates simply by asking what a p-value is, or what precision/recall are (this inclu…

I'm surprised people bother spending so much energy looking for someone who is both a statistician and a computer scientist knowing they are so rare. There are so many more statisticians who can at least communicate and work effectively with developers and vice versa. Why not just compose a team? I feel like just like other professionals have assistants, statisticians should have them too, and they'd be focused on th…

This is a classic problem that shows up equally with lots of related areas: numerical work, statistics, ML, signal processing etc.

"just compose a team" sounds easy, doesn't it? Unfortunately there are lots of failure modes involving different parts of the team not really understanding what each other are trying to do, let alone what they are doing, and subtle errors getting by people who don't know what to look for. So, you can find such teams and some of them work well but a lot of them don't.

So an alternate is to try and find or create domain experts who mix all the appropriate skills, but this is hard and in the extreme case involves chasing down unicorns.

Companies and industries flop back and forth between preferring different approaches - right now a lot of people are talking about "data scientists" as one of the latter, but it will likely change over time as it always does.

It's a hard problem, and it shows.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#29

Post by CSDude »

At least you have been told the reasons, even if they are true or not. I recently had many tech/behavioral interview with team and passed, but after a review with VP of X, saying we decided not to move forward is way worse than this. I still keeep wondering 'What is wrong with me?' even after years of interviews. I have some suspicions, but never a promising answer. If I oneday found a company, first company policy would be to tell the candidates to tell why they were not hired in a polite way.

Re: Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

#30

Post by mindcrime »

wgyn wrote: post #7
rubayeet wrote: post #2

"Networking is still king" My takeaway from it.

I think that just "networking" would be the wrong takeaway, though. The author[0] is pretty active on Twitter / the blogosphere and, even though I don't follow him personally, his writing has popped up on my feed a number of times. He's likely meeting people and having interesting conversations ("networking") because he has interesting things to say. [0] https://twitter.com/tdhopper

Not just blogging, but Tim is also active in terms of attending / speaking at various industry conferences and what-not. Whether he is doing it simply to "build his brand" or because he genuinely enjoys it, or both, is something I can't speak to. But I think he's definitely "meeting people and having interesting conversations".
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