A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
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A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
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Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#2Unfortunately there is very little here that isn't just general interview advice.
As a new grad that went through the hunt very recently - it was a messy process. Very few places will consider you without extensive experience, or a masters/Ph.D. Of course if you're hiring people to research machine learning algorithms that's justifiable, but plenty of the responsibilities people associate with data scientists don't require advanced degrees.
And the number of posts asking for 5, 7, even 10 years of experience... absolutely astounding.
As someone uninterested in going back to school, I've resigned myself to getting some work experience and doing personal projects for 1-2 yrs before trying again.
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#3[deleted]
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#4So I've been interviewing for data analyst/science positions since leaving Apple in April.
I may do a postmortem on my search later, but speaking from my experience with many, many interviews over the past couple months, the TL;DR is that the conventional interview wisdom on Hacker News/the cscareerquestions subreddit/this article is wrong and out of date. Interviews for such positions require a different set of skills than just reading Cracking the Code Interview (and ones that you can't get at a data bootcamp).
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#5So I've been interviewing for data analyst/science positions since leaving Apple in April. I may do a postmortem on my search later, but speaking from my experience with many, many interviews over the past couple months, the TL;DR is that the conventional interview wisdom on Hacker News/the cscareerquestions subreddit/this article is wrong and out of date . Interviews for such positions require a different set of ski…
If you had to summarize into three points?
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#6So I've been interviewing for data analyst/science positions since leaving Apple in April. I may do a postmortem on my search later, but speaking from my experience with many, many interviews over the past couple months, the TL;DR is that the conventional interview wisdom on Hacker News/the cscareerquestions subreddit/this article is wrong and out of date . Interviews for such positions require a different set of ski…
What kinds of technical questions do they ask in a data science interview?
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#7So I've been interviewing for data analyst/science positions since leaving Apple in April. I may do a postmortem on my search later, but speaking from my experience with many, many interviews over the past couple months, the TL;DR is that the conventional interview wisdom on Hacker News/the cscareerquestions subreddit/this article is wrong and out of date . Interviews for such positions require a different set of ski…
What kinds of technical questions do they ask in a data science interview?
On the stats side, often higher-level theory questions, such as "How does the k-means algorithm work?", "How do you select the best k for k-means?", "What is the curse of dimensionality?" which again would not be things covered at a data boot camp or data science thought pieces on Medium.
On the technical side, there is often more-advanced SQL (nested JOINs + PostgreSQL window functions). On the big data side, there is often discussion of distributed systems (e.g. Spark clusters) and practical algorithmic complexity at scale (i.e. instant fail if you suggest anything loglinear or slower).
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#8How many data scientist jobs are actually out there? I can understand data scientist being a position at one of the big 5 tech companies, but are they really in demand elsewhere?
I've never actually met someone off the internet who calls themselves a data scientist.
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#9How many data scientist jobs are actually out there? I can understand data scientist being a position at one of the big 5 tech companies, but are they really in demand elsewhere? I've never actually met someone off the internet who calls themselves a data scientist.
And in some consultancies too.
Re: A Student's Guide to Preparing for Data Science Interviews
#10So I've been interviewing for data analyst/science positions since leaving Apple in April. I may do a postmortem on my search later, but speaking from my experience with many, many interviews over the past couple months, the TL;DR is that the conventional interview wisdom on Hacker News/the cscareerquestions subreddit/this article is wrong and out of date . Interviews for such positions require a different set of ski…
If you had to summarize into three points?
I have one notable observation:
On Hacker News, every time an interview thread pops up, there is a discussion decrying the use of technical screenings before an onsite, and often suggest practical work experience instead using a homework assignment (which this article does not discuss).
Most of the companies I've talked with for data analyst/science roles have given me both a homework assignment and a technical screen before the onsite. And often a prescreen test before both of them.
There have been a number of occasions where I easily passed the homework screen but failed the technical screen (without any feedback as to why). And it's beginning to get annoying.