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Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

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Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#71

Post by renewiltord »

whatshisface wrote: post #46
1970-01-01 wrote: post #6

This book has fun problems! Example: During the cold war, the U.S.A developed a speech to text (STT) algorithm that could theoretically detect the hidden dialects of Russian sleeper agents. These agents (Fig. 3.7), were trained to speak English in Russia and subsequently sent to the US to gather intelligence. The FBI was able to apprehend ten such hidden Russian spies and accused them of being "sleeper" agents. The A…

A single letter is chosen randomly? Huh? Why would you do that?

Seems a bit pointless to ask. You want them to make up a story? "The data scientist's radio link degrades to static while he waits for the answer and all he hears is the letter 'l'". There.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#72

Post by kevinventullo »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #21
jstx1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're fine as long as you know the format and have an opportunity to prepare or just get in the right mindset for it. And some things (like binary search) should be easy to write anyway. The SQL questions can also be a symptom of the type of job - Facebook's first data science round focuses a lot on SQL but that's because it's a very product/analytics/decision-making focused role without that much coding or…

Facebook Product Data Science has always been a Product Analyst role more than anything else. I did the interviews a while back, and it was a pretty fun experience, but it's not what a lot of people call data science.

In my experience, it varied greatly from team to team.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#73

Post by pugio »

I'm really enjoying the discussion here, as I've been thinking a lot about what a full modern ML/DS curriculum would look like.

I currently work for a non-profit investigating making a free high quality set of courses in this space, and would love to talk to as many people either working in ML/DS or looking to get into the field. (I have ideas but would prefer to ground them in as many real-world experiences as I can collect.)

If anyone here wouldn't mind chatting about this, or even just sharing an experience or opinion, please drop me an email (in my profile).

EDIT: We already have Into to DS, and a Deep RL sequence far along in our pipeline, but are looking to see where we can help the most with available resources.

I really appreciate this Interviews book as an example of what topics might be necessary (and at what level), taking into account the qualifying discussion here, of course.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#74

Post by minimaxir »

kragen wrote: post #67
minimaxir wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Binary search in particular is surprisingly tricky, which is precisely what makes it useful for telling if someone knows how to program . That's the problem. There are many other ways to do that without risking false negatives and annoying potential candidates (e.g. I would not reapply to places that have rejected me due to skepticism about my programming abilities and using tests blatantly irrelevant to day-to-day…

There are levels of not knowing how to program that go beyond FizzBuzz. But sure, many programming jobs don't require them.

If that's the case for the DS/ML domain, then a short take-home exam should provide a better example of practical coding ability (the common counterargument that "take-home exams can be gamed" is a strawman that would be more on the interviewer's fault for creating a flawed exam).

In my case, I typically got the "implement binary search" questions in a technical interview after I passed a take-home exam, which just makes me extra annoyed.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#75

Post by jpindar »

rindalir wrote: post #17
light_hue_1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a joke. Like, we joke that the more math you learn the less arithmetic you can do (ok, maybe that one isn't a joke).

In my undergrad abstract algebra class our professor asked us a question about finding the order of a group that involved dividing 32/8 and we all just sat there for ten seconds before someone bravely ventured "...four?"

I've experienced that many times among groups of electrical engineers - we're all fine discussing equations but once its time to plug in the numbers no one wants to volunteer an answer.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#76

Post by kragen »

TrackerFF wrote: post #37
1970-01-01 wrote: post #6

This book has fun problems! Example: During the cold war, the U.S.A developed a speech to text (STT) algorithm that could theoretically detect the hidden dialects of Russian sleeper agents. These agents (Fig. 3.7), were trained to speak English in Russia and subsequently sent to the US to gather intelligence. The FBI was able to apprehend ten such hidden Russian spies and accused them of being "sleeper" agents. The A…

Likewise, in the military, the use of countersigns have been designed to make non-native speakers stand out - should the countersign be compromised. For example, in WW2, Americans would use "Lollapalooza", as Japanese really struggled with that word.

Hmm, I'd think that in a rhotic accent a word like "furlstrengths" or "fatherlands" would work better? In Japanese they sound like [ɸɯ̟ɾɯ̟ɾɯ̟sɯ̟tɯ̟ɾiĩsɯ̟] or [haɾɯ̟sɯ̟tɯ̟ɾiĩsɯ̟] and [hazaɾɯ̟randozɯ̟] respectively, rather than the native [fɚɹłstɹiŋθs] or [fɚɹłstɹiŋkθs] and [faðɚlændz]. Adjacent /rl/ pairs are a special challenge, there are multiple unvoiced fricatives that don't exist at all in Japanese, and consonant clusters totally violate Japanese phonotactics to the point where it's hard for Japanese people to even detect the presence of some of the consonants. By contrast Japanese [ɾaɾapaɾɯ̟za] is only slightly wrong, requiring a little bit more bilateral bypass on the voiced taps and a slight rounding of the ɯ̟ sound.

Some Japanese-American soldiers would be SOL tho.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#77

Post by kragen »

minimaxir wrote: post #74
kragen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are levels of not knowing how to program that go beyond FizzBuzz. But sure, many programming jobs don't require them.

If that's the case for the DS/ML domain, then a short take-home exam should provide a better example of practical coding ability (the common counterargument that "take-home exams can be gamed" is a strawman that would be more on the interviewer's fault for creating a flawed exam). In my case, I typically got the "implement binary search" questions in a technical interview after I passed a take-home exam, which just m…

Agreed.

If you're gaming the take-home exam by looking up the answer on Stack Overflow, you could game the same exam in person by reading books of interview questions ahead of time, and the interviewer can avoid that by making up new questions. (OTOH if you're gaming the take-home exam by paying someone else to solve the problem for you, that might be harder to tell.)

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#78

Post by jollybean »

vsareto wrote: post #56
hintymad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reason for such requirements is similar to that that software engineers need to leetcode hard: supply and demand. Prestigious companies get hundreds, if not thousands, of applications every day. The companies can afford looking for candidates who have raw talent, such as the capability of mastering many concepts and being able solve hard mathematical problems in a short time. Case in point, you may not need to use…

I can’t help but think there’s been a ton of filters used in the past to figure out if someone is deeply geeky, and we’ll continue to invent more in the future. It’s really looking like another rat race. Especially since there’s no central authority, every hiring manager has the potential to invent their own filter, and make it arbitrarily harder or easier based on supply and demand (and then the filter drifts away f…

But if there is an abundance of supply, the company has to use some kind of filter.

Testing for geekyness and ability to solve tricky coding math problems, seems like a rational way to do that.

If companies were starving for talent because 'nobody could pass the test' - it would be another thing.

But they have to set the bar on something, somewhere.

I can't speak to AI/ML but I would imagine it might be hard to hire there, given the very deep and broad concepts, alongside grungy engineering.

I've rarely had such fascination and interest in a field that I would never actually want to work in.

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#79

Post by devoutsalsa »

mcemilg wrote: post #41

The ML/DS positions highly competitive these days. I don't get why ML positions requires hard preparations for the interviews more than other CS positions while you do similar things. People expect you to know a lot of theory from statistics, probability, algorithms to linear algebra. I am ok with knowing basic of these topics which are the foundations of ML and DL. But I don't get to ask eigenvectors and challenging…

I figure the best way to prepare for an ML job is to pull out the nastiest working rat’s nest of if statements you’ve ever written & claim it was autogenerated by an adversarial network (which was you fighting with your coworkers over your spaghetti code).

Re: Deep Learning Interviews book: Hundreds of fully solved job interview questions

#80

Post by MontyCarloHall »

hintymad wrote: post #44
mcemilg wrote: post #41

The ML/DS positions highly competitive these days. I don't get why ML positions requires hard preparations for the interviews more than other CS positions while you do similar things. People expect you to know a lot of theory from statistics, probability, algorithms to linear algebra. I am ok with knowing basic of these topics which are the foundations of ML and DL. But I don't get to ask eigenvectors and challenging…

A reason for such requirements is similar to that that software engineers need to leetcode hard: supply and demand. Prestigious companies get hundreds, if not thousands, of applications every day. The companies can afford looking for candidates who have raw talent, such as the capability of mastering many concepts and being able solve hard mathematical problems in a short time. Case in point, you may not need to use…

> Case in point, you may not need to use eigenvectors directly in the job, but the concept is so essential in linear algebra and I as a hiring manager would expect a candidate to explain and apply it in their sleep.

Exactly. Whenever eigenvectors come up during interviews, it’s usually in the context of asking a candidate to explain how something elementary like principal components analysis works. If they claim on their CV to understand PCA, then they’d better understand what eigenvectors are. If not, it means they don’t actually know how PCA works, and the knowledge they profess on their CV is superficial at best.

That said, if they don’t claim to know PCA or SVD or other analysis techniques requiring some (generalized) form of eigendecomposition, then I won’t ask them about eigenvectors. But given how fundamental these techniques are, this is rare.

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