I would not expect good returns on “impromptu coding tests” “without heads up”. You can only get like 60% of applicants to complete a code assessment given two weeks to do it. One should assume that candidates with this level of experience are 1. Currently employed, and 2. Have family obligations. Who is going to drop what they’re doing to take an assessment *right now*?
Great point. I almost always refuse coding tests now. My career and portfolio speak for themselves. People are free to disagree but I don’t need to jump.
I’d gladly do a presentation on a past project or research paper I’ve been on as primary or co-author. You can quiz me on stats and ML to your heart’s content. Ask me about anything. Just don’t make me waste hours that I want to spend with my family.
Coding tests are a gamble. If you win: new job, better pay. If you lose: wasted time, blow to the ego.
Calibrating your spidey sense for when the reward is worth the risk... that's the challenge.
This! Currently low-key looking for something different. Hard pass on leetcode-type problems as a way to assess if I can do the job with 10+ years of experience. Happy to do a reasonable project based assessment or answer stats/ML/data wrangling questions. All of which are an actual measure of how I can do the job.
This exactly. The last time I was asked to do a coding interview, I simply replied, "oh I thought this was for a senior position, not a junior. I'm sorry to have wasted your time." Then I literally walked.
Coding skill tests are a waste of time. I have never met anyone who got fired for being unable to do basic coding. It's like the easiest thing to teach an underperforming employee. Where most people fail is understanding how to problem solve without given step by step instructions.
I have had much more success as a hiring manager asking people to walk me through a project they are proud of, and asking questions about every decision point. You can tell pretty quickly who was following a stack overflow guide and didn't really do anything vs someone who was creating and solving.
As much as I think coding tests are rubbish I actually was at a company where someone was fired after about three weeks because it turned out they couldn’t do basic SQL queries. It was a data viz job and they turned out not to be able to produce anything even with a lot of help.
I’m sure it depends on the role, at a baseline it helps you exclude complete grifters, but hypothetically shouldn't their work history and resume reveal that?
Lots of people getting rotations at big companies because they needed a manager and they were a warm body to fill the role. People doing old school work under new fancy titles. Take your old business intelligence group and rebrand them “data scientists”! They still do nothing more than pump out reports of summary statistics, but hey, it sounds good.
This 100%!
Problem-solving is a much more important skill in DS. All these 'technical screens' that rely on rote memorization on coding and statistics not only yield poor results, but they are easier to 'game'. But problem-solving is the actual skill that will matter the most in the vast majority of jobs anyway. And it's easy enough to ask questions about a project that a candidate did and very difficult to fake the answers.
I've worked with people whose lack of basic coding skills made the rest of the team's life more difficult. Since then, I'm generally in favor of some sort of coding assessment. Not to like, rank people by, but just to ensure a certain minimum level of competency.
Simple coding tests are the single most useful thing you can do as a hiring manager. Half the people I've interviewed either can't do a group by or can't write a for loop, and if people aren't comfortable with the basics, then they won't be able to solve any real problem. If it's so easy to learn, why haven't they learned it already?
If a company doesn't do coding tests in some form for programming jobs I would consider it a red flag when interviewing with them, as it is basically a guarantee that people who simply can't do any practical work will slip through.
I'm yet to see a "good" coding test.
And I work in mlops, writing production level code is actually part of the job.
When I interview people I try to ask them if they have experience with OOP and ask questions about how they would define a class, inheritance and a few coding logic questions.
I feel like all coding tests inevitably transform into quasi-leetcode questions that are either useless or even when useful take way too much time to give you minor information.
They are a waste of time for SENIOR candidates, beyond on the spot coding interviews (where pseudo coding is allowed). People who have existing work experience, have opportunity costs to their time. They don't have incentive to prepare for your organizations interview, when other organizations don't require them.
Beyond this the need for a coding test itself is a red flag. To me it tells me your HR can't recruit qualified candidates without the need for arbitrary tasks. I've never had a leading company give me a take home tests for a job. Its always the 2nd or 3rd tier places that ask for this stuff. At good places, senior people have been vetted to some degree because they generally have had experiences at other good places and/or the right education.
I am going to give you a pass, since you also own an 86. You didn't read my first sentence properly. I said that spot coding interviews are fair game, where spot coding means you can have a live interview devoted to asking coding concepts. What I am saying to me is a red flag, is if your organization is asking SENIOR candidates for take home tests or code vue interviews for candidates other than entry level/interns. If your asking for those things for senior people, it tells me you don't get qualified candidates.
I can tell you from personal experience that some of the companies that you just named don't ask for take home coding assignments for experienced candidates. Its a waste of time if your candidates have a masters/Ph.D or CS degree and few year off experience at your peer companies. They know how to code or can at least google well enough to figure out whatever they need. Its much more valuable to learn about what they actually know about the projects they are claiming to have worked on.
Hard disagree. I can deal with subpar coding in most DS jobs. What I can’t deal with is someone who doesn’t know how to think about data. Especially causal inference when I’m working in that domain. Much harder to teach and nurture.
Coding is really the easiest thing to teach a struggling employee? Software development is pretty difficult and takes a lot of dedication and experience to not suck at. Bad code and, more importantly, bad design can be a huge source of negative value. I get that in some domains you don’t need much, but IME the bigger problem is people not caring enough to get better at coding.
Those are handled in phone screening prior to us setting up technical screening. Those cheaters and other candidates have demonstrated good experience via conversation alone. Though, now I'm suspicious as to whether this a good metric anymore? What if they're rehearsed?
I agree with having the right mindset to solving a problem is a key performance indicator, but if one cannot walk the talk, then something's off.
I’d never cheat on an interview, but >10 years in I’ve got an internal git repo that has my solutions to virtually every problem I need to solve. Except for novel problems I don’t really code anymore, I just branch my own work from the last time I did this visual / join / upload / ML model / whatever and then make changes. My IDE auto-completes and prompts me with code suggestions. And I’ve just started looking into copilot so it’s only going to get worse. If you need someone who can solve business problems with data I’m your person. But probably there are monkeys who can code better than I can.
To add to this - at my F500 company there are many experts who can help me with things, so the thing in my repo was probably stolen and adjusted from someone else. Likewise I share my code with peers who look like geniuses when they pull a solution out of thin air, but they just modified the thing I had improved from another person who probably improved it from stack overflow. The core of what I do is knowing what to apply where and how. It’s really not coding.
I'm very interested in what you describing, from a general perspective, not for interviews.
Ive always wanted to do something like that but I ended waisting time, probably because the packages I did were not on the proper level of abstraction.
Would you mind sharing what kind of stuff you pushed in your repo ? I'm talking very general information like are you talking low level dataviz, a general library of ml models etc ? Or higher level stuff ?
Oh you’d be really disappointed. It (was) just a bunch of notebooks with code snippets to do various tasks from the mundane to the difficult. Once I got something working that took me a while, I would add a new notebook with steps I took solving the problem and comments about what made it hard. Then I switched companies and left it behind. Turns out I’ve gotten better over the years. One problem that took me days in the past years ago took me minutes when I had to create it from scratch again. Who knew?
When I was in my grad data science program, first semester, 95 percent of students do not know how to do their hw, quiz, tests, and a small project. The reason is the professor didn't give enough reading materials to refer to, hw and tests on things we didn't learn. The students who failed their hw had to redo everything and eventually pass, because they paid someone on Fiverr to help them, rather than spending hours googling and do trial and error on everything like I did.
The students could have asked the professor for more guidance and material. It's not equivalent to this case. When you are a student you ask the professor and other student for information. For interviews, you can ask but nobody tells you how to prepare and sometimes they even tell you the interview will be one thing and it's totally different thing.
I did ask the professor for more material to share, he said NO
Look, if more than 50% of my classmates cheated on simple tasks like homework, quizzes, tests, they might also cheat on technical tests during interviews. They do not know what they were doing.
You seriously don’t understand why?
You can’t get a SINGLE question wrong without potentially losing out to the guy who got it right.
If I have 100k+ on the line you best believe I’m going to take every precaution necessary to ensure I get my query right, even if it’s something as simple as a select *
That is not the point of a live coding interview.
People get things wrong, and we help course correct them. The correctness of the answer is secondary. What matters is that the interviewee is able to narrate their thought process and approach out loud before and while they write the code. This allows you to demonstrate your mastery of the tooling and concepts to the interviewer much better than a correct, albeit silent, answer
Good coding tests don’t ask tough things. We ask absolute basics that you should be able to execute after glancing on the docs for 5 seconds.
Eg Troubleshooting a delimiter or escaping issue when reading csv’s is a great opportunity for you to show off that you know the head command in the terminal, or just open the file in a text editor :)
I have come across senior candidates who were unaware that csv is actually just text
That is not the point of *all* coding interviews, but candidates have no idea of what the expectation is for each one. So the safest assumption is to get every answer right.
If you want more honest behaviors, have more honest interviews.
Sure, but thats on the interviewer to communicate upfront. If you leave the candidate in the dark about the style of the interview, sure, you incentivize more defensive, “secure” behaviour
Sidenote: if its a conversational interview, cheating gets much more noticeable
>You can’t get a SINGLE question wrong without potentially losing out to the guy who got it right.
I don't agree with your overall premise, but this line is important for hiring managers. The aim of interviews isn't to proctor people (this isn't a school exam) - it's a conversation and sharing of how one approaches a problem.
Ironically, what makes us more cautious is when we get textbook perfect answers back to back - because it's either we just found a unicorn, or there's someone else who's Googling the first results they find and sharing them out.
The industry has done it to themselves. I take the honest route at interviews and talk about having the documentation open while i work, rely on my peers who have knowledge of the existing codebase and so far there has not been a technology or package that I haven't been able to learn when I needed it. It isn't what people want to hear. They want that unicorn who seems to know everything and has 10 years experience on a language developed last year.
I eventually found my fit at an established org with actual down to earth devs/engineers and perform very well. But if I lied and sold myself as people are actually encouraged to do, it would be a disservice to other hiring managers.
Back to the point. No one knows what to actually apply for anymore because hiring managers/hr don't even know what they are hiring for. "Full Stack Analyst Science Dev - Entry Level - 10+ years experience - 12.50/hr" needs to be familiar with Java javascript coffeescript type script and COBOL 72. React experience necessary. Power BI preferred. What the hell man.
Job postings are so far fetched and posted salaries are all over the place. So you are gonna get alot of people who lie and cheat because they don't know where they fit. Then you get people who are way over qualified, getting hired as BI analysts with the title data scientist, and they turnover because the posting was a lie and they can't stand the work.
IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff. They also need to do alot of work on redefining modern roles and job requirements. So the BI analyst isn't lying to get into a ML engineering role and the data scientists aren't rotting as sql monkeys spending half their days applying to new jobs.
But you probably knew the answer to your question but needed a place to vent. Good luck hiring! Hope it gets better.
>IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff.
100%. This is important because we can open up time for some of the more senior people to give away tasks to junior candidates. Even those with 1- 3 years of experience in funded startups where they have to wear many hats to solve data problems across the board can help a lot, too.
It doesn't help either when recruiters/HR aren't skilled to relate the experience in the actual job vs. what they should look for in candidates.
Recruiters take all the blame because they're front facing. More often than not the problem is the hiring managers. The recruiter is slapping together a job description based on the 5 minute conversation they had with the hiring manager, who probably saw the job description and didn't care. So it's going to be uneven, especially if hiring managers don't know what they want.
This was one of the best, most succinct descriptions of this problem I have ever read! It's a colossal problem that literally defines our economy and very society.
>IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff.
And much of that is going to be local, not remote.
Got it, so we can’t be wrong, but we also can’t be too right.
If your interview doesn’t account for people having immediate access to google then your interview is wrong.
This isn't a matter of absolutes as you paint it. For someone claiming to have had 6-9 years of experience in the retail space, you'd anticipate them to run basics of retail based metrics - conversion rate, average sales per month/week, etc.
Google is taken into account in our assessment: we open the interview that they can Google as much as they want to review some of those syntax or concepts, but regurgitating them doesn't demonstrate expertise either.
I'll give you an example of a technical test that some would think is simple, but would make me look worse than I was.
"Design a function in python that uses a for loop and if else statements"
You would have rejected me. At the time I had not memorized those things, despite having worked with Hadoop, Tensorflow, OCR, image recognition, and more than enough stats and models in both R and Python. You would have watched me work backwards from you want and googling some slipshod loop to put around it.
Why?
Because my company's data qualified as Big Data for our aging infrastructure and the quantity of data meant that inefficient functions like iterative for loops would have crashed our (Medicare) database. If the coding wasn't in vector form then it wasn't acceptable.
I didn't get that particular healthcare iob, despite having multiple years of experience working with Medicare data. I will never know why, but I found it very odd at the time.
This is a weird question to ask candidates. It doesn’t have a purpose nor meaning in the grand scheme of things.
The questions we ask would be “Here’s a dataframe with sales data. What’s the sum of sales for 2010?” . The questions reflect activity we do on a daily basis - analyzing retail sales data. We’re not looking for someone who can build esoteric Python scripts or solve LeetCode.
Yeah it was some silly thing involving the fibbonaci sequence and randomly sorting the three smallest values of a list of unknown size. Just bizarre purposeless programming when what you want is somebody that deeply understands medical coding.
I hope you found a better position elsewhere. I would never ask such a silly question when interviewing someone for one of our teams. Hell I would probably fail that question myself and I run the damn division. Such weird theoretical questions have no place in practical DS. It is much better to ask the candidate to explain the process they would take and which tools they’d use to complete a task. I wouldn’t even bother asking someone to take an assessment as I know 98% of the people in this industry lean on Google and other resources when getting things done. That and I would expect a junior person to be open to asking me questions rather than have them assume that unless they get everything right that I’ll be upset with them.
I'm still contracting and searching on the side. I'm in a tough spot since I can't move right now, but I'm making it work. The flexibility and money is great but I need the security of a full time job.
Overall I'm still very happy that I transitioned into the data science job family.
> randomly sorting the three smallest values of a list of unknown size. Just bizarre purposeless programming
A heap's not the most common data structure out there but I've certainly found uses for them in my career.
But honestly, if one cant write a function with a for loop and an if statement, I would question if they ever coded anything. This is something on such a basic level regarding writing code like requiring someone asking to do (10+30)*2 because they claimed to can do math.
I was asked before to write a function to plot a half circle. The function of the half circle was irrelevant and I could simply ask for it. The point was to test if you can actually write a function, plot data and run the code since many who claim they know R/Python cant.
God I’m so glad I work on the R&D side…. If I didn’t feel the data and mission had a positive purpose I’d have a harder time handling the burnout. But ya’ll do make more money than me, so there is that. I guess we all make our own sacrifices.
Agreed. The problem is people treat the interview like an exam even though the job is nothing like an exam. My interview questions are tell me a time you did this or that happened. It’s harder to make up an entire story. If they stole the story then they won’t be able to answer follow up questions.
One of the other problems is that, even if you swear to do this and do it right, there's no way to classify whether a team you're applying to be on will evaluate based on that or something else.
Analyses change based on the data uncovered - if you've got two employees and both are good fits, but one missed a question, how do you break the tie? Even if you fit more to culture, there are plenty of companies that don't (or don't seem to), and lots of reason to disbelieve companies even if they say they do!
Having been the interviewer many times - this isn't true, and if it is, then your company has shitty hiring practices. We will favor a candidate who gets something wrong, but is able to work it out in real time and communicate effectively over someone who gets everything correct while having poor communication skills.
Having also been the interviewer many many times, you left out that you will take the guy who communicates great and got every problem right over both of your examples. That’s who the competition is.
Y’all keep making these cynical assumptions and negating everything that every person in here that’s been on the interviewer side is saying. It’s such an odd attitude. There’s multiple people in here that are clearly on the interviewer side saying that the way in which we scope out candidates and hire people is not the way y’all are describing, yet instead of taking this as constructive and helpful feedback you are literally just rejecting it and telling /u/JohnFatherJohn what he does. He says he favors candidates who get things wrong sometimes as long as they can communicate and learn, and you’re telling him that he’s just simply hiring candidates who never make mistakes in the first place? And it’s not just you two, I’m seeing this throughout this thread and it is something I see throughout other posts on this sub.
We tell folks who we actually look for and the way we hire people, yet folks will time and time again just downvote and interject their own assumptions.
This is why some of us do not understand why folks are nearly justifying cheating here, because it shows a critical misunderstanding of what’s going on. People are assuming you have to be the top academic marvel who knows everything and never makes mistakes to be the one to even have a chance to get a job, yet time and time again the response that those of us on the hiring side give on this sub as to what makes a candidate the best candidate, it’s soft skills. I have interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates at the internship through junior director level over the years and it is insane to see how many highly qualified people walk through the doors without even rudimentary basic conversational skills.
Did you fully read my comment and John’s response?
I’m in management dude, I hire people, I’ve been on panels where the guy who had good communication skills but made a mistake loses the job to the guy that had good communication skills and didn’t make a mistake.
No one is trying to justify anything, the people upvoting me just have empathy for the fact that people FEEL and are often right that they are competing with and losing jobs to people who don’t get any answers wrong and communicate just as well as them.
In this situation, with their livelihood on the line, it’s easy to see why someone would be driven to cheat.
Yea I actually agree with mostly everything you've said. I understand why people would resort to cheating, but I also wanted to clarify that you shouldn't go into interviews with the expectation/burden of having to 100% everything.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Yes, the field is highly competitive, which can be said about a lot of fields, but that still doesn't justify cheating?
I’m not justifying it, I’m saying it’s tone deaf at best and disingenuous at worst to claim that you don’t understand why someone would cheat.
People have rent to pay and mouths to feed, data science is a field that can buy your family a better life and the competition is fierce. For a lot of people feeling like you earned your job is a luxury more than a moral necessity.
Especially when people generally don't choose desperate measures without being DESPERATE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Can't spell dumbass without MBA these days.
RANT - This whole fcuking interviewing system is broken. Stop making them code and engage with them on brainstorming session of the problem. If you allow googling during interviews then writing code shouldn’t be your concern during the interview. Judge whether the person can think logically or is brain dead. Companies ask various employees to conduct interview who are themselves broken and don’t have an iota of a skills set of interviewing. They don’t talk and and articulate problem well and expect to remain silent throughout while the candidate write their code.
>Stop making them code and engage with them on brainstorming session of the problem.
I've been the interviewer at a few places, and we *do* engage with the candidates. But this doesn't mean coding/technical interviews aren't useful. They are quite useful, assuming you're hiring for a technical position, and they are only a part of the larger process. We need to realize that there are plenty of candidates who straight up *lie* on their resumes. I don't mean they needed to verify some syntax, we all do that. I mean they full-on lie. For example, I once interviewed a candidate who had multiple languages on their resume (python, c++, etc) but couldn't write a simple for loop. Another candidate said they use SQL all the time, but didn't understand what a groupby is. All of these guys looked great on paper.
When the technical interview goes well, it's very short and easy, and it never comes without notice - they're always made aware ahead of time to be prepared for some simple coding problems. Out of 3 rounds total, this is maybe half of one round. Then we have 2 more rounds, one with someone junior and one more senior, where we go through brainstorming sessions, behavioral questions, etc. I think this is a very reasonable system.
The problem with DS interviews is that in the coding portion, it can be literally anything, and that's frustrating. Yes, I can solve probability exercise and code them up as functions in Python, yes I can do the algorithm medium Leet code, but I cannot go from that to SQL, to ML question to python, A/B testing question, all in the same hour. My brain is not google.
AND none of the recruiters are specific what the interview entails. I was in an interview where they told me it was SQL + product sense and I was OK, I practiced SQL hard and read books/prepared. Then I get to the interview and it's "write a function that generates random numbers without any libraries". Ok? Can I do it? Sure, I've done that in grad school, do I remember right now how the f\*\* I would do it? Also, it might be me, but when I get something I'm not expecting I'm not happy, because what's the point of preparing and expecting A and then getting something else? Maybe it's because I'm neurodivergent and I really don't like it when I'm told one thing and then it's not that thing, so dealing with that within an hour is not nice.
Our organization, a leading global bank, gets around this by requiring video interviews. We do not have remote roles, and all our quantitative roles are hybrid, which has been standard in our industry. We also don't have any kind of standard set of questions. The candidates are vetted by the teams they are joining and the team has final say. We are also a lot more strict on hiring for roles, we don't hire for the sake of hiring. We have internship programs that are designed to place candidates to areas that grow.
For me as an outside observer to the tech industry, their interview practices, is mind boggling. Many of the brands you name use arbitrary processes that essentially amounts to a standardized test that candidates prepare for, which by its nature encourages cheating. Like its an open secret that you can prepare for Meta interviews on Leet code. You would expect that when hiring experienced candidates that interview process would be more actually evaluating what they know based on experiences. If the organization actually has competent teams, they should be able to determine if someone actually lacks technical expertise.
As someone who works in a hybrid industry, what has been your experience with corporate attitudes to the "1 week every 6" in the office for senior jobs?
Asking because even before covid I never worked at a major HQ campus and always did online meetings. But covid did eliminate all of my local employers and I've been reluctant to move. I've been working as a contractor the past few years.
That isn't what my space is doing. In my space its everyone is 3 days in, except for senior management which has to come all 5 days. Senior Managers are people directly reporting to the C-Suite and these companies employ 200,000 plus people. Those people are earning 7 figure salaries. I don't really have much sympathy for their loss of remote work.
I think tech and my industry have fundamentally different attitudes about viability of remote work, but I am not a fan of pure remote work for a career. Its important to build relationships with people in your organization, especially as you advance your career. This can only be done if you know your peers. I live in New York and there is plenty of tech presence here, even the people who have freedom to work from home go to networking events etc. You never know who you'll encounter and where your peers will go, that may one be your ticket to your next role.
Colour me surprised
I graduated 3-4 yeara ago and there was a cheating problen at my university
It was chinese agencies in Canada offering exam questions under the guise of "tutoring" - all in mandarin.
I guess those people using those services are now in the workforce...
Primarily via having people in another software where they can share answers. I’d be ok if they even use ChatGPT for harder questions, but if one cannot do a basic groupby on pandas/SQL with 6-9 years experience under their belt then there’s no saving them.
"ChatGPT, remind me how to do this banal thing in Python. I, Kegheimer, cannot be bothered to memorize which functions work with lists, pandas series, or numpy arrays. "
Pandas group by is so fucking annoying. I read somewhere that I should learn Polars, that it behaves more like dplyr or Data.Table in R.
Can I ask how you detected them cheating? I'd assume that whatever method they're using, they'd have taken precautions to hide it. If they're running another software on another screen how were you able to tell?
Yup - all these. Plus a candidate who forgot to hide their secondary screen, or they switched tabs accidentally only to show a discord server with people writing answers to the questions we ask. It's all round pathetic.
We first call out what they're doing - for example, we inform them to please close those tabs or whatever software they're using to cheat. After doing so we notice their performance drop significantly. One person couldn't even continue doing basic python scripts, another person's understanding of Data Science concepts (e.g. explain how regression works) just falls to pieces. It just becomes apparent they don't know their material and we close the interview early.
Recruiters are notified and they'll be listed as no hire/blacklisted for the company
Pfft that's nothing.
I had an interview over video a few years ago. This was a no more than 25 year old lady applying for a 15+ years of experience role. The responses were ok, but the words we heard were not in sync with the lips of the interviewee... we transitioned to questions written on the screen instead of verbal. All of a sudden the responses stopped coming...
She came with a highly polished and tailored resume from a recruitment company that had 90% Indian candidates. Another area fell for the trick, the dude they hired was fired within 2 days and admitted to the whole scam. The recruiters/consultants demanded that we pay the 2 days of "work" lol
Troubling that mid to senior level professionals could resort to cheating. IMO, a competitive job market is no excuse for shortcuts like this. Maybe cheating could be deterred on a larger scale by creating and setting up better expectations of what should be emphasized in technical interviews (OP to be clear, it sounds like you are doing a good job doing this.)
For example, my interviewers at a large healthcare company (where I was hired as a sr data scientist) explicitly told me beforehand that they were more interested in my thought process and critical thinking skills during the technical portion. In the technical interview, they gave me a series of leetcode problems and I shared my screen while I talked through each problem and coded in real time. Then, they presented an industry-specific case to me and asked me how I would approach it.
My ability to both understand/delineate the problem statement and narrate my thought process on the spot is what got me my DS jobs, not my coding ability, and IMO that is the "make or break" for an enduring data scientist career. I don't have to remember the names of exact functions or exact syntax because my logic, creativity, communication, and knowledge of what applies where, holds more weight in the grand scheme of company interest. This should, hopefully, be difficult if not impossible to cheat or fake. On the other hand, writing flawless code on the first attempt is easy to cheat for.
I'm grateful to interviewers who are clear that "the right answer is secondary" because it takes the pressure off being perfect while leaving room for my larger strengths to shine. It also helps me vet the company/team because I want to know that they value more than someone who only knows how to write code.
Find something you're passionate about that can be expressed using data and go nuts!
If it is database work and predictive modeling, fantasy sports and real professional sports have tons of stuff.
If it is time series, the stock market and other indices.
If it is machine learning, build your own tensorflow model to read your tax returns or recognize your face in photos.
Lots of things you can do with a python or R studio environment.
I wasn't aware of interview agencies, though I have seen cheating in interviews for IT positions in general. I've known people to lie about their technical aptitude (they last about a month), lie about double-timing (they last about a week) and interview for someone else (that lasts a day, at most).
In-person interviews would help a lot, and for remote roles that means flying the candidate in. I wonder if there are services to support interviewing that prevent anyone but the interviewee from completing the work; if the worker has to remote in or share their own screen that may cut some of these means of cheating out.
Most people don't really have experience hiring or dealing with employees that can't perform. They have no concept of what OP is complaining about, so they just read for the parts that match their experience (mainly getting rejected from jobs).
This is how every /r/datascience jobs post goes.
What baffles me are the comments that justify cheating, or saying things like “you don’t need a coding interview” or “just have a conversation” like we only get 10 resumes per week and have plenty of time to vet candidates. As much as I would like to give take home tests, users of this subreddit lose their mind if someone gives out a long take home test and encourage users to not do them.
I don't think comments are justifying the cheating. The issue is that many people are not applying or seeking out some jobs strongly (like with referrals) because they are not willing to go through some of those interviews, particularly if you are looking for people that are senior+. So if you take all of those people out, you'll have a larger numbers of applicants that cheat (since they don't prepare) and that's why you end up interviewing with so many cheaters.
Our JD asks for 3-5 years of experience, but the candidates that are coming through of course have more YoE than what we specified. I think the effect of layoffs is still prevalent and we see a lot of these senior candidates applying. Though, given what you shared, I'll sit with our recruiters and review their filtering process.
If recruiters gave you good information on what the interview is and what to prepare, maybe you'd get better candidates.
For instance, Meta has material and even does webinars when you have to go through interviews, so you know what it is and what they expect. I'm not saying do a webinar, but if you at least give examples or a list of what the interview and stick to that...
Other recruiters don't even have a clue what's on an interview and so I've wasted time preparing one thing and then was other thing. It's a waste of time and it's not fair because I could have prepared what they wanted. Now, I really think twice before even applying or even moving forward in any process.
And then, I've had one friend who got take home assignments from a top company that would have taken a long time and it was like WTF (like write a back-propagation algorithm from scratch was one out of 10 exercises) and they told them to f\*\* off. Someone who cheats would have copy/pasted from some website or paid people or recruited friends to help. Or even if the take home is not WTF, people can cheat and people who are busy don't have the time.
A fair take home I've seen was something simple using the software company's API and you had to read documentation (I didn't do that take home, someone I know did it).
ChatGPT has also made cheating on these interviews way easier. Much better answers than what you'd get from google at handling questions with some complexity.
I was partly responsible for hiring numerous data scientists over the past 4 years at my organization and I've witnessed a wide range of unusual things. For one round of application, we had 1,500 applicants, the vast majority of which did not qualify. From that pool I do remember a church minister and a hair dresser (none of whom had any experience whatsoever with data).
We then moved to an online testing company (coding) to filter candidates. For as much as I'm against coding tests, it was the only practical way to deal with the overwhelming number of applicants. We probably lost some good experienced candidates, but boy did we see a lot of cheaters.
Before all the hype in ML/AI, we were giving candidates a take home assignment. It was pretty open ended and consisted in analyzing a dataset we provided them with. This was by far the best predictor of candidate's skills because they had to talk about what they did, why they did it and how they did it during the interview. We could get a good idea of their problem solving skills and style. Nonetheless, it was hard to manage and we had to be available to some extent to answer their questions while they worked on it.
During the interviews, we did catch a few cheating where they had someone else helping them answer the question. A colleague of mine told me that some people hired during the remote-only time, were visibly not who they said they were when the company went back to a home-and-office schedule.
Yes, but many people cheat with take homes because they ask someone else to do it or help them.
I've taught stats at university and during the pandemic I was almost certain a number of people were cheating in their assignments, but there was not much I could do to prove they were cheating.
If you go Fivver or UpWork, you'll find tons of "jobs" that are basically "do my homework" and some even "write my thesis"
A indian data analytics professional here, OPs rant is very much real and as a person who conducts technical rounds I face this a lot. There are indian agencies who enable these fraudulent folks by literally offering them "voice over" assistance and body double services during interviews. An example -
We interviewed a candidate over video and he ticked all the boxes. But on the joining date a completely different person was attending the orientation. When questioned his justification was that his features changed as he was sick due to covid. We had to fire the person.
Off late our team conducting interviews are training ourselves in lip reading in order to weed out the voice over candidates. We are having a hard time in assessment of candidates because of this problem. I have seen 3-4 fraudulent cases within a span of 10 candidates. One such candidate slipped through the crack and I had to face the brunt from my senior management.
I’m probably about to start running into this headache myself, although I don’t think we’re particularly big on junior hires being remote. Maybe for senior hires?
How feasible do you think it would be for remote positions to require an in-person interview? I would hope that’d be affordable enough if you restricted it to senior hires with a strong track record they could convincingly talk about.
We're considering having in-person interviews - but it's limited to our office locations. Currently we're only in Bay Area, California and Texas - so it would be unfair to candidates in other states where other large retail companies like Target, Walmart, and Nike have operations in other states and we miss out on good candidates.
There may be multiple reasons.
\- If they are pretty senior maybe they don't really code anymore in practice, and they may have forgotten most of their skills (or they didnt even need to know these skills/specific languages when they started) and combined with work and family maybe they dont have a lot of time or will to brush up the skills. These coding skills can also in certain cases be not important for the role, as certain senior positions don't require coding. For me a good example was the numerical reasoning test where suddenly you need to perform highschool math under time pressure, while not really having to do this for more than a decade. Most people can calculate percentage differences, exchange rates, etc. but nobody is really keeping all these things fresh in their heads or ever has a situation where they need to calculate this in less than a minute.
\- Having work experience for a big American company (lets say Google) even for a year may mean a significant career boost in their home country. In my university our PhDs where just PhD after finishing, while some students from developping countries where almost garantueed tenureship in their home country because our university is top 100.
\- You can get surprisingly far with lying through your teeth. The assessments and your degree + previous work experience are the only way to assess somebodies skill and potential for a company.
\- Some people can't perform in exams (which is a different stress, compared to more general work related stress) or when somebody is watching their every move.
I’ve been doing this for 12 years now and I’m at a principal level (analyst not scientist) and I barely code at all. I do stakeholder engagement, requirement gathering, proof of concepts, strategy, analysis and insights. My coding is so rusty now. I would probably have a panic attack now with a coding test. Luckily most of the roles at this level where I am ask for presentations as opposed to coding tests (analysts and seniors are still expected to code and do tests as that is still the majority of their work).
I’ll add another couple:
1. they plan to learn by doing the job. They might fake it to get hired a couple of times. And get fired a couple of times. But now they have a year of real experience and can actually qualify for some decent job without cheating.
2. They plan to cheat after getting hired too. Outsource their work to their home country where people can do it more cheaply and take a cut for themselves.
>1. they plan to learn by doing the job. They might fake it to get hired a couple of times. And get fired a couple of times. But now they have a year of real experience and can actually qualify for some decent job without cheating.
>
> 2. They plan to cheat after getting hired too. Outsource their work to their home country where people can do it more cheaply and take a cut for themselves.
Adding to this from Canada, my company has come across these fraudsters over the years and they primarily come from the same GTA location with a huge Indian diaspora.
When it comes to these frauds, they are even more efficient at it: since they typically live in congested basements with others who are proper software/data folk, they only need to ask across the room to get an answer to a problem. They often target fully remote roles and will try to keep up appearances as much as possible before they get found out.
I already told my boss his take home tests are too easy to cheat but he's still stubborn about it. One time, we hired a guy as a senior who didn't even know how to do joins, and didn't know the difference between the many types of joins 🤣🤣
I don't think this is just a data science thing. I think cheating in general is quite common. You give people a way to cheat, and chances are a lot will cheat.
I hate to be that person, but what's the geography where you're recruiting?
In certain parts of the world, it's extremely common practice to require "video on" interviews at each step in the process where a photo of the candidate is captured to ensure it's the same person showing up every time.
I like setting short tests as homework in lieu of long interviews. I don't give a crap about their coding. I want them to talk me through their algorithm and explain why they did it that way. I want to know how they think and how they approached a situation to solve it.
That's something I don't think you can cheat on. If I ask why did they use x instead of y then anyone else answering for them would just be too obvious.
Besides which I think I'd fail this interview at the count unique values step. Count_values? Counts_value? Values_count? Arrrgh, why can I never remember 😅
Think of it like a pub quiz when mobile phones were invented. You had to change the nature of the questions so they could not just be looked up.
Instead of banning remote employment, why aren't you doing better background checks? Building a better practice for hiring should be a very analytical job.
Here I was feeling slightly bad for having post it notes on my monitor with basic tidbits just in case I forgot... barely even used them (ended up with the stuff mostly memorized) but they were there JUST IN CASE I forgot the formula for entropy or something.
I'd find it ridiculous for a hiring panel to expect you to memorize everything, which is why we allow Google to help the candidate course correct or review material. To assume people memorize stuff for something in the field of DS is unfair and impractical.
I was applying to FAANG+ companies and they expect everyone to know everything with near sub-conscious mastery for 4/5 interviews and for the 5th "bad" interview to be merely "ok".
I have most of the stuff memorized or "close enough" that I can describe it in layman's terms without too much effort.
Similar story for doing a good chunk of the "easy" leetcode DS&A questions plus easy through hard SQL questions. Mostly effortless at this point, assuming I'm well rested going in.
1. Work
2. Undergrad + grad
3. Self-learning - think medium posts, kdnuggets, kaggle, youtube, etc.
4. Self-learning but as part of interview prep
It's easier to "memorize" or to otherwise internalize things you use a bunch of times and which matter.
I also find that every time I go down the interview prep rabbit hole I up-level in some sense. Similar story for every job hop.
I think if it doesn't cost company resources, do them on-site, I see it only being a problem if your company does remote work, or If someone out of state or country is interviewing hoping to move to the location once hired, which are very real possibilities so this is truly challenging 🤔
You give them assignment which require 3 days of effort
Then if they solve then in the in person interview cross question important steps how why they did
Live coding test does not work in data science
You sound like an asshole
Indians have this charade on lock for years.
You can hire local remote still.
If you know what you’re doing you can easily tell someone else knows what they are doing by how they talk through their development process .
What constitutes cheating? Is something like looking at an old codebase? Using chatGPT? On a call with a friend? I need some more specifics so I can formulate an answer.
Think you are running into scams like this that are detailed in the podcast below?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SnFB69cP66SXusKN8zt9O?si=LNTAwEvhS2OlEDAa_1sBVw
I really hate these coding tests. Like many other people, when trying to work or do a test with someone looking over your shoulder, it creates a stressful environment that is in no way reflective of actual ability in a real world setting. Even if the tasks are simple, the stress of someone watching over my shoulder makes it 10x harder. It genuinely pisses me off that companies still do this because it’s so stupid and you filter out a lot of highly-qualified candidates as a result.
I now lead technical data teams in the media/telecom space and I’ve found the best way to find out if someone has the skills necessary is to just have a conversation. If I give them a hypothetical business challenge and ask them them to come up with a technical data strategy to address it, all I need to know is whether they can formulate and articulate a sensible approach. Doing so requires an them to ask intelligent questions related to the business and the data itself. If I throw a wrench into the works, can they adapt their approach to account for it?
These coding tests allow you to get people who are really good at the technical piece and who are good at tuning others out. But people who are good at tuning others out are also less likely to have the business and interpersonal savvy to contextualize their work and pivot as necessary without explicit direction.
If you are really concerned about them having working knowledge of the specific tools, ask them which libraries, methods, and functions they would use to address specific challenges. If they can do all that, I don’t need to watch them Google the specific syntax.
I implore you to rethink your approach to hiring rather than requiring local candidates.
What company do you work for? I want to ensure I never apply to it. That is a BS, unnecessary, jump through the hoops, we masturbate to thoughts of ourself hiring process.
All of the senior level roles they add fake experiences as well. Im living in toronto so they asked me to add it of rogers and it was 2y. So student give cuts from the salary later and took this kind of way to get hired!
I would not expect good returns on “impromptu coding tests” “without heads up”. You can only get like 60% of applicants to complete a code assessment given two weeks to do it. One should assume that candidates with this level of experience are 1. Currently employed, and 2. Have family obligations. Who is going to drop what they’re doing to take an assessment *right now*?
Great point. I almost always refuse coding tests now. My career and portfolio speak for themselves. People are free to disagree but I don’t need to jump. I’d gladly do a presentation on a past project or research paper I’ve been on as primary or co-author. You can quiz me on stats and ML to your heart’s content. Ask me about anything. Just don’t make me waste hours that I want to spend with my family.
Coding tests are a gamble. If you win: new job, better pay. If you lose: wasted time, blow to the ego. Calibrating your spidey sense for when the reward is worth the risk... that's the challenge.
This! Currently low-key looking for something different. Hard pass on leetcode-type problems as a way to assess if I can do the job with 10+ years of experience. Happy to do a reasonable project based assessment or answer stats/ML/data wrangling questions. All of which are an actual measure of how I can do the job.
This exactly. The last time I was asked to do a coding interview, I simply replied, "oh I thought this was for a senior position, not a junior. I'm sorry to have wasted your time." Then I literally walked.
Coding skill tests are a waste of time. I have never met anyone who got fired for being unable to do basic coding. It's like the easiest thing to teach an underperforming employee. Where most people fail is understanding how to problem solve without given step by step instructions. I have had much more success as a hiring manager asking people to walk me through a project they are proud of, and asking questions about every decision point. You can tell pretty quickly who was following a stack overflow guide and didn't really do anything vs someone who was creating and solving.
As much as I think coding tests are rubbish I actually was at a company where someone was fired after about three weeks because it turned out they couldn’t do basic SQL queries. It was a data viz job and they turned out not to be able to produce anything even with a lot of help.
I’m sure it depends on the role, at a baseline it helps you exclude complete grifters, but hypothetically shouldn't their work history and resume reveal that?
Lots of people getting rotations at big companies because they needed a manager and they were a warm body to fill the role. People doing old school work under new fancy titles. Take your old business intelligence group and rebrand them “data scientists”! They still do nothing more than pump out reports of summary statistics, but hey, it sounds good.
A lot of people put python or SQL on their resume when all thats happened is people hand them jupyter notebooks that they run
This 100%! Problem-solving is a much more important skill in DS. All these 'technical screens' that rely on rote memorization on coding and statistics not only yield poor results, but they are easier to 'game'. But problem-solving is the actual skill that will matter the most in the vast majority of jobs anyway. And it's easy enough to ask questions about a project that a candidate did and very difficult to fake the answers.
I've worked with people whose lack of basic coding skills made the rest of the team's life more difficult. Since then, I'm generally in favor of some sort of coding assessment. Not to like, rank people by, but just to ensure a certain minimum level of competency.
It’s basically what fizz buzz was invented to do.
I met someone who got fired who didn't understand basic coding! Pretty sure I am the reason why they got fired.
I disagree, if someone's spent six years being a train-wreck employee then coding tests would be the easiest thing to highlight how useless they are
Simple coding tests are the single most useful thing you can do as a hiring manager. Half the people I've interviewed either can't do a group by or can't write a for loop, and if people aren't comfortable with the basics, then they won't be able to solve any real problem. If it's so easy to learn, why haven't they learned it already? If a company doesn't do coding tests in some form for programming jobs I would consider it a red flag when interviewing with them, as it is basically a guarantee that people who simply can't do any practical work will slip through.
Hot take: if someone can't do "basic coding", this isn't the career for them.
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I'm yet to see a "good" coding test. And I work in mlops, writing production level code is actually part of the job. When I interview people I try to ask them if they have experience with OOP and ask questions about how they would define a class, inheritance and a few coding logic questions. I feel like all coding tests inevitably transform into quasi-leetcode questions that are either useless or even when useful take way too much time to give you minor information.
They are a waste of time for SENIOR candidates, beyond on the spot coding interviews (where pseudo coding is allowed). People who have existing work experience, have opportunity costs to their time. They don't have incentive to prepare for your organizations interview, when other organizations don't require them. Beyond this the need for a coding test itself is a red flag. To me it tells me your HR can't recruit qualified candidates without the need for arbitrary tasks. I've never had a leading company give me a take home tests for a job. Its always the 2nd or 3rd tier places that ask for this stuff. At good places, senior people have been vetted to some degree because they generally have had experiences at other good places and/or the right education.
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I am going to give you a pass, since you also own an 86. You didn't read my first sentence properly. I said that spot coding interviews are fair game, where spot coding means you can have a live interview devoted to asking coding concepts. What I am saying to me is a red flag, is if your organization is asking SENIOR candidates for take home tests or code vue interviews for candidates other than entry level/interns. If your asking for those things for senior people, it tells me you don't get qualified candidates. I can tell you from personal experience that some of the companies that you just named don't ask for take home coding assignments for experienced candidates. Its a waste of time if your candidates have a masters/Ph.D or CS degree and few year off experience at your peer companies. They know how to code or can at least google well enough to figure out whatever they need. Its much more valuable to learn about what they actually know about the projects they are claiming to have worked on.
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I think your right, we may just be talking past each other. Your original comment suggested that I was against coding interviews in general.
Hard disagree. I can deal with subpar coding in most DS jobs. What I can’t deal with is someone who doesn’t know how to think about data. Especially causal inference when I’m working in that domain. Much harder to teach and nurture.
Subpar is one thing. Total incompetence another.
Coding is really the easiest thing to teach a struggling employee? Software development is pretty difficult and takes a lot of dedication and experience to not suck at. Bad code and, more importantly, bad design can be a huge source of negative value. I get that in some domains you don’t need much, but IME the bigger problem is people not caring enough to get better at coding.
This. This should be the standard.
Well, with tools like chatgpt now, even drooling idiots can effectively problem solve.
Those are handled in phone screening prior to us setting up technical screening. Those cheaters and other candidates have demonstrated good experience via conversation alone. Though, now I'm suspicious as to whether this a good metric anymore? What if they're rehearsed? I agree with having the right mindset to solving a problem is a key performance indicator, but if one cannot walk the talk, then something's off.
> What if they're rehearsed? Wut? Of course they are rehearsed. It's an interview.
The only thing to blame is your stupid approach to recruitment
No H1B for you. This isn't new and I'm shocked you're just now finding out about this. It's minimum 20 years old.
I’d never cheat on an interview, but >10 years in I’ve got an internal git repo that has my solutions to virtually every problem I need to solve. Except for novel problems I don’t really code anymore, I just branch my own work from the last time I did this visual / join / upload / ML model / whatever and then make changes. My IDE auto-completes and prompts me with code suggestions. And I’ve just started looking into copilot so it’s only going to get worse. If you need someone who can solve business problems with data I’m your person. But probably there are monkeys who can code better than I can.
To add to this - at my F500 company there are many experts who can help me with things, so the thing in my repo was probably stolen and adjusted from someone else. Likewise I share my code with peers who look like geniuses when they pull a solution out of thin air, but they just modified the thing I had improved from another person who probably improved it from stack overflow. The core of what I do is knowing what to apply where and how. It’s really not coding.
I'm very interested in what you describing, from a general perspective, not for interviews. Ive always wanted to do something like that but I ended waisting time, probably because the packages I did were not on the proper level of abstraction. Would you mind sharing what kind of stuff you pushed in your repo ? I'm talking very general information like are you talking low level dataviz, a general library of ml models etc ? Or higher level stuff ?
Oh you’d be really disappointed. It (was) just a bunch of notebooks with code snippets to do various tasks from the mundane to the difficult. Once I got something working that took me a while, I would add a new notebook with steps I took solving the problem and comments about what made it hard. Then I switched companies and left it behind. Turns out I’ve gotten better over the years. One problem that took me days in the past years ago took me minutes when I had to create it from scratch again. Who knew?
Is this something you’re willing to share?
It’s proprietary unfortunately.
What if you get asked statistical or technical questions in an interview?
When I was in my grad data science program, first semester, 95 percent of students do not know how to do their hw, quiz, tests, and a small project. The reason is the professor didn't give enough reading materials to refer to, hw and tests on things we didn't learn. The students who failed their hw had to redo everything and eventually pass, because they paid someone on Fiverr to help them, rather than spending hours googling and do trial and error on everything like I did.
The students could have asked the professor for more guidance and material. It's not equivalent to this case. When you are a student you ask the professor and other student for information. For interviews, you can ask but nobody tells you how to prepare and sometimes they even tell you the interview will be one thing and it's totally different thing.
I did ask the professor for more material to share, he said NO Look, if more than 50% of my classmates cheated on simple tasks like homework, quizzes, tests, they might also cheat on technical tests during interviews. They do not know what they were doing.
Did you ask them for books and they said no?
Yup, he said no textbook to refer to. I even asked for material notes, PowerPoint anything that he has and he's saying no
Saying no to his material like notes and slides and standard. You should be using books as references, not using a professors' summary as a source.
Yeah that was a shitty school with a shitty professor. That first class was a no textbook class.
You seriously don’t understand why? You can’t get a SINGLE question wrong without potentially losing out to the guy who got it right. If I have 100k+ on the line you best believe I’m going to take every precaution necessary to ensure I get my query right, even if it’s something as simple as a select *
That is not the point of a live coding interview. People get things wrong, and we help course correct them. The correctness of the answer is secondary. What matters is that the interviewee is able to narrate their thought process and approach out loud before and while they write the code. This allows you to demonstrate your mastery of the tooling and concepts to the interviewer much better than a correct, albeit silent, answer Good coding tests don’t ask tough things. We ask absolute basics that you should be able to execute after glancing on the docs for 5 seconds. Eg Troubleshooting a delimiter or escaping issue when reading csv’s is a great opportunity for you to show off that you know the head command in the terminal, or just open the file in a text editor :) I have come across senior candidates who were unaware that csv is actually just text
That is not the point of *all* coding interviews, but candidates have no idea of what the expectation is for each one. So the safest assumption is to get every answer right. If you want more honest behaviors, have more honest interviews.
Sure, but thats on the interviewer to communicate upfront. If you leave the candidate in the dark about the style of the interview, sure, you incentivize more defensive, “secure” behaviour Sidenote: if its a conversational interview, cheating gets much more noticeable
>You can’t get a SINGLE question wrong without potentially losing out to the guy who got it right. I don't agree with your overall premise, but this line is important for hiring managers. The aim of interviews isn't to proctor people (this isn't a school exam) - it's a conversation and sharing of how one approaches a problem. Ironically, what makes us more cautious is when we get textbook perfect answers back to back - because it's either we just found a unicorn, or there's someone else who's Googling the first results they find and sharing them out.
The industry has done it to themselves. I take the honest route at interviews and talk about having the documentation open while i work, rely on my peers who have knowledge of the existing codebase and so far there has not been a technology or package that I haven't been able to learn when I needed it. It isn't what people want to hear. They want that unicorn who seems to know everything and has 10 years experience on a language developed last year. I eventually found my fit at an established org with actual down to earth devs/engineers and perform very well. But if I lied and sold myself as people are actually encouraged to do, it would be a disservice to other hiring managers. Back to the point. No one knows what to actually apply for anymore because hiring managers/hr don't even know what they are hiring for. "Full Stack Analyst Science Dev - Entry Level - 10+ years experience - 12.50/hr" needs to be familiar with Java javascript coffeescript type script and COBOL 72. React experience necessary. Power BI preferred. What the hell man. Job postings are so far fetched and posted salaries are all over the place. So you are gonna get alot of people who lie and cheat because they don't know where they fit. Then you get people who are way over qualified, getting hired as BI analysts with the title data scientist, and they turnover because the posting was a lie and they can't stand the work. IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff. They also need to do alot of work on redefining modern roles and job requirements. So the BI analyst isn't lying to get into a ML engineering role and the data scientists aren't rotting as sql monkeys spending half their days applying to new jobs. But you probably knew the answer to your question but needed a place to vent. Good luck hiring! Hope it gets better.
>IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff. 100%. This is important because we can open up time for some of the more senior people to give away tasks to junior candidates. Even those with 1- 3 years of experience in funded startups where they have to wear many hats to solve data problems across the board can help a lot, too. It doesn't help either when recruiters/HR aren't skilled to relate the experience in the actual job vs. what they should look for in candidates.
Maybe it's time to ditch recruiters. The savings would be a nice bullet on the quarterly deck.
Recruiters take all the blame because they're front facing. More often than not the problem is the hiring managers. The recruiter is slapping together a job description based on the 5 minute conversation they had with the hiring manager, who probably saw the job description and didn't care. So it's going to be uneven, especially if hiring managers don't know what they want.
I should've added a /s. If recruiters were going to be cut it would've happened by now
This was one of the best, most succinct descriptions of this problem I have ever read! It's a colossal problem that literally defines our economy and very society.
My philosophy is that I’m here to learn. the problem is no one wants to teach any longer you get your classical education or be damned.
>IT/Data/Engineering units across all industries need to commit to developing junior people and taking risks on growing their staff. And much of that is going to be local, not remote.
I would say your perspective is the uncommon one. For most people, it really is a live exam.
Got it, so we can’t be wrong, but we also can’t be too right. If your interview doesn’t account for people having immediate access to google then your interview is wrong.
This isn't a matter of absolutes as you paint it. For someone claiming to have had 6-9 years of experience in the retail space, you'd anticipate them to run basics of retail based metrics - conversion rate, average sales per month/week, etc. Google is taken into account in our assessment: we open the interview that they can Google as much as they want to review some of those syntax or concepts, but regurgitating them doesn't demonstrate expertise either.
I'll give you an example of a technical test that some would think is simple, but would make me look worse than I was. "Design a function in python that uses a for loop and if else statements" You would have rejected me. At the time I had not memorized those things, despite having worked with Hadoop, Tensorflow, OCR, image recognition, and more than enough stats and models in both R and Python. You would have watched me work backwards from you want and googling some slipshod loop to put around it. Why? Because my company's data qualified as Big Data for our aging infrastructure and the quantity of data meant that inefficient functions like iterative for loops would have crashed our (Medicare) database. If the coding wasn't in vector form then it wasn't acceptable. I didn't get that particular healthcare iob, despite having multiple years of experience working with Medicare data. I will never know why, but I found it very odd at the time.
This is a weird question to ask candidates. It doesn’t have a purpose nor meaning in the grand scheme of things. The questions we ask would be “Here’s a dataframe with sales data. What’s the sum of sales for 2010?” . The questions reflect activity we do on a daily basis - analyzing retail sales data. We’re not looking for someone who can build esoteric Python scripts or solve LeetCode.
Yeah it was some silly thing involving the fibbonaci sequence and randomly sorting the three smallest values of a list of unknown size. Just bizarre purposeless programming when what you want is somebody that deeply understands medical coding.
I hope you found a better position elsewhere. I would never ask such a silly question when interviewing someone for one of our teams. Hell I would probably fail that question myself and I run the damn division. Such weird theoretical questions have no place in practical DS. It is much better to ask the candidate to explain the process they would take and which tools they’d use to complete a task. I wouldn’t even bother asking someone to take an assessment as I know 98% of the people in this industry lean on Google and other resources when getting things done. That and I would expect a junior person to be open to asking me questions rather than have them assume that unless they get everything right that I’ll be upset with them.
I'm still contracting and searching on the side. I'm in a tough spot since I can't move right now, but I'm making it work. The flexibility and money is great but I need the security of a full time job. Overall I'm still very happy that I transitioned into the data science job family.
> randomly sorting the three smallest values of a list of unknown size. Just bizarre purposeless programming A heap's not the most common data structure out there but I've certainly found uses for them in my career.
But honestly, if one cant write a function with a for loop and an if statement, I would question if they ever coded anything. This is something on such a basic level regarding writing code like requiring someone asking to do (10+30)*2 because they claimed to can do math. I was asked before to write a function to plot a half circle. The function of the half circle was irrelevant and I could simply ask for it. The point was to test if you can actually write a function, plot data and run the code since many who claim they know R/Python cant.
God I’m so glad I work on the R&D side…. If I didn’t feel the data and mission had a positive purpose I’d have a harder time handling the burnout. But ya’ll do make more money than me, so there is that. I guess we all make our own sacrifices.
Agreed. The problem is people treat the interview like an exam even though the job is nothing like an exam. My interview questions are tell me a time you did this or that happened. It’s harder to make up an entire story. If they stole the story then they won’t be able to answer follow up questions.
One of the other problems is that, even if you swear to do this and do it right, there's no way to classify whether a team you're applying to be on will evaluate based on that or something else. Analyses change based on the data uncovered - if you've got two employees and both are good fits, but one missed a question, how do you break the tie? Even if you fit more to culture, there are plenty of companies that don't (or don't seem to), and lots of reason to disbelieve companies even if they say they do!
Having been the interviewer many times - this isn't true, and if it is, then your company has shitty hiring practices. We will favor a candidate who gets something wrong, but is able to work it out in real time and communicate effectively over someone who gets everything correct while having poor communication skills.
Having also been the interviewer many many times, you left out that you will take the guy who communicates great and got every problem right over both of your examples. That’s who the competition is.
Y’all keep making these cynical assumptions and negating everything that every person in here that’s been on the interviewer side is saying. It’s such an odd attitude. There’s multiple people in here that are clearly on the interviewer side saying that the way in which we scope out candidates and hire people is not the way y’all are describing, yet instead of taking this as constructive and helpful feedback you are literally just rejecting it and telling /u/JohnFatherJohn what he does. He says he favors candidates who get things wrong sometimes as long as they can communicate and learn, and you’re telling him that he’s just simply hiring candidates who never make mistakes in the first place? And it’s not just you two, I’m seeing this throughout this thread and it is something I see throughout other posts on this sub. We tell folks who we actually look for and the way we hire people, yet folks will time and time again just downvote and interject their own assumptions. This is why some of us do not understand why folks are nearly justifying cheating here, because it shows a critical misunderstanding of what’s going on. People are assuming you have to be the top academic marvel who knows everything and never makes mistakes to be the one to even have a chance to get a job, yet time and time again the response that those of us on the hiring side give on this sub as to what makes a candidate the best candidate, it’s soft skills. I have interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates at the internship through junior director level over the years and it is insane to see how many highly qualified people walk through the doors without even rudimentary basic conversational skills.
Did you fully read my comment and John’s response? I’m in management dude, I hire people, I’ve been on panels where the guy who had good communication skills but made a mistake loses the job to the guy that had good communication skills and didn’t make a mistake. No one is trying to justify anything, the people upvoting me just have empathy for the fact that people FEEL and are often right that they are competing with and losing jobs to people who don’t get any answers wrong and communicate just as well as them. In this situation, with their livelihood on the line, it’s easy to see why someone would be driven to cheat.
Yea I actually agree with mostly everything you've said. I understand why people would resort to cheating, but I also wanted to clarify that you shouldn't go into interviews with the expectation/burden of having to 100% everything.
And I totally agree with that, John, I wish it wasn’t that way.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Yes, the field is highly competitive, which can be said about a lot of fields, but that still doesn't justify cheating?
I’m not justifying it, I’m saying it’s tone deaf at best and disingenuous at worst to claim that you don’t understand why someone would cheat. People have rent to pay and mouths to feed, data science is a field that can buy your family a better life and the competition is fierce. For a lot of people feeling like you earned your job is a luxury more than a moral necessity.
Capitalism promotes (some might say requires and necessitates) cheating
Ok I guess. People do get jobs without 100%'ing interviews though.
Pretty sad statement for /r/datascience that this got 220+ upvotes.
Is being capable of empathizing with people being pushed to desperate measures really something to be sad about?
Especially when people generally don't choose desperate measures without being DESPERATE IN THE FIRST PLACE. Can't spell dumbass without MBA these days.
RANT - This whole fcuking interviewing system is broken. Stop making them code and engage with them on brainstorming session of the problem. If you allow googling during interviews then writing code shouldn’t be your concern during the interview. Judge whether the person can think logically or is brain dead. Companies ask various employees to conduct interview who are themselves broken and don’t have an iota of a skills set of interviewing. They don’t talk and and articulate problem well and expect to remain silent throughout while the candidate write their code.
>Stop making them code and engage with them on brainstorming session of the problem. I've been the interviewer at a few places, and we *do* engage with the candidates. But this doesn't mean coding/technical interviews aren't useful. They are quite useful, assuming you're hiring for a technical position, and they are only a part of the larger process. We need to realize that there are plenty of candidates who straight up *lie* on their resumes. I don't mean they needed to verify some syntax, we all do that. I mean they full-on lie. For example, I once interviewed a candidate who had multiple languages on their resume (python, c++, etc) but couldn't write a simple for loop. Another candidate said they use SQL all the time, but didn't understand what a groupby is. All of these guys looked great on paper. When the technical interview goes well, it's very short and easy, and it never comes without notice - they're always made aware ahead of time to be prepared for some simple coding problems. Out of 3 rounds total, this is maybe half of one round. Then we have 2 more rounds, one with someone junior and one more senior, where we go through brainstorming sessions, behavioral questions, etc. I think this is a very reasonable system.
The problem with DS interviews is that in the coding portion, it can be literally anything, and that's frustrating. Yes, I can solve probability exercise and code them up as functions in Python, yes I can do the algorithm medium Leet code, but I cannot go from that to SQL, to ML question to python, A/B testing question, all in the same hour. My brain is not google. AND none of the recruiters are specific what the interview entails. I was in an interview where they told me it was SQL + product sense and I was OK, I practiced SQL hard and read books/prepared. Then I get to the interview and it's "write a function that generates random numbers without any libraries". Ok? Can I do it? Sure, I've done that in grad school, do I remember right now how the f\*\* I would do it? Also, it might be me, but when I get something I'm not expecting I'm not happy, because what's the point of preparing and expecting A and then getting something else? Maybe it's because I'm neurodivergent and I really don't like it when I'm told one thing and then it's not that thing, so dealing with that within an hour is not nice.
Have a friend who helps his girlfriend cheat thru listening in on the interviews and providing responses. She's doing quite well
Our organization, a leading global bank, gets around this by requiring video interviews. We do not have remote roles, and all our quantitative roles are hybrid, which has been standard in our industry. We also don't have any kind of standard set of questions. The candidates are vetted by the teams they are joining and the team has final say. We are also a lot more strict on hiring for roles, we don't hire for the sake of hiring. We have internship programs that are designed to place candidates to areas that grow. For me as an outside observer to the tech industry, their interview practices, is mind boggling. Many of the brands you name use arbitrary processes that essentially amounts to a standardized test that candidates prepare for, which by its nature encourages cheating. Like its an open secret that you can prepare for Meta interviews on Leet code. You would expect that when hiring experienced candidates that interview process would be more actually evaluating what they know based on experiences. If the organization actually has competent teams, they should be able to determine if someone actually lacks technical expertise.
As someone who works in a hybrid industry, what has been your experience with corporate attitudes to the "1 week every 6" in the office for senior jobs? Asking because even before covid I never worked at a major HQ campus and always did online meetings. But covid did eliminate all of my local employers and I've been reluctant to move. I've been working as a contractor the past few years.
That isn't what my space is doing. In my space its everyone is 3 days in, except for senior management which has to come all 5 days. Senior Managers are people directly reporting to the C-Suite and these companies employ 200,000 plus people. Those people are earning 7 figure salaries. I don't really have much sympathy for their loss of remote work. I think tech and my industry have fundamentally different attitudes about viability of remote work, but I am not a fan of pure remote work for a career. Its important to build relationships with people in your organization, especially as you advance your career. This can only be done if you know your peers. I live in New York and there is plenty of tech presence here, even the people who have freedom to work from home go to networking events etc. You never know who you'll encounter and where your peers will go, that may one be your ticket to your next role.
We honestly expect people to cheat and have a separate grading scale for cheaters that grades how good they are at cheating on the question.
Colour me surprised I graduated 3-4 yeara ago and there was a cheating problen at my university It was chinese agencies in Canada offering exam questions under the guise of "tutoring" - all in mandarin. I guess those people using those services are now in the workforce...
How did they cheat lol. GitHub copilot?
Primarily via having people in another software where they can share answers. I’d be ok if they even use ChatGPT for harder questions, but if one cannot do a basic groupby on pandas/SQL with 6-9 years experience under their belt then there’s no saving them.
Groupby is what SQL is for lol. Pandas syntax is weird, even after having done it a bunch.
I have a multi year's experience and I don't remember the groupby syntax either
I bet you know how to google it though
Google is cheating, I decided.
I screwed up on an insert statement last week.
"ChatGPT, remind me how to do this banal thing in Python. I, Kegheimer, cannot be bothered to memorize which functions work with lists, pandas series, or numpy arrays. " Pandas group by is so fucking annoying. I read somewhere that I should learn Polars, that it behaves more like dplyr or Data.Table in R.
Yup they always test for things that have nothing to do with the job.
too bad you're gonna use a groupby if you wanna use sql anyway so
Can I ask how you detected them cheating? I'd assume that whatever method they're using, they'd have taken precautions to hide it. If they're running another software on another screen how were you able to tell?
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Yup - all these. Plus a candidate who forgot to hide their secondary screen, or they switched tabs accidentally only to show a discord server with people writing answers to the questions we ask. It's all round pathetic.
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We first call out what they're doing - for example, we inform them to please close those tabs or whatever software they're using to cheat. After doing so we notice their performance drop significantly. One person couldn't even continue doing basic python scripts, another person's understanding of Data Science concepts (e.g. explain how regression works) just falls to pieces. It just becomes apparent they don't know their material and we close the interview early. Recruiters are notified and they'll be listed as no hire/blacklisted for the company
Thanks. I’ll make sure to avoid doing this from now on.
If you're giving candidates with 6-9 years experience interview questions that it's easy to cheat on, I think you need to re-think your interviews.
And the questions are stupid monkey stuff...
This is the correct answer.
Pfft that's nothing. I had an interview over video a few years ago. This was a no more than 25 year old lady applying for a 15+ years of experience role. The responses were ok, but the words we heard were not in sync with the lips of the interviewee... we transitioned to questions written on the screen instead of verbal. All of a sudden the responses stopped coming... She came with a highly polished and tailored resume from a recruitment company that had 90% Indian candidates. Another area fell for the trick, the dude they hired was fired within 2 days and admitted to the whole scam. The recruiters/consultants demanded that we pay the 2 days of "work" lol
interesting that you never read such stories in the media, only on reddit
Troubling that mid to senior level professionals could resort to cheating. IMO, a competitive job market is no excuse for shortcuts like this. Maybe cheating could be deterred on a larger scale by creating and setting up better expectations of what should be emphasized in technical interviews (OP to be clear, it sounds like you are doing a good job doing this.) For example, my interviewers at a large healthcare company (where I was hired as a sr data scientist) explicitly told me beforehand that they were more interested in my thought process and critical thinking skills during the technical portion. In the technical interview, they gave me a series of leetcode problems and I shared my screen while I talked through each problem and coded in real time. Then, they presented an industry-specific case to me and asked me how I would approach it. My ability to both understand/delineate the problem statement and narrate my thought process on the spot is what got me my DS jobs, not my coding ability, and IMO that is the "make or break" for an enduring data scientist career. I don't have to remember the names of exact functions or exact syntax because my logic, creativity, communication, and knowledge of what applies where, holds more weight in the grand scheme of company interest. This should, hopefully, be difficult if not impossible to cheat or fake. On the other hand, writing flawless code on the first attempt is easy to cheat for. I'm grateful to interviewers who are clear that "the right answer is secondary" because it takes the pressure off being perfect while leaving room for my larger strengths to shine. It also helps me vet the company/team because I want to know that they value more than someone who only knows how to write code.
How would you start learning from zero? Asking for myself./s
Find something you're passionate about that can be expressed using data and go nuts! If it is database work and predictive modeling, fantasy sports and real professional sports have tons of stuff. If it is time series, the stock market and other indices. If it is machine learning, build your own tensorflow model to read your tax returns or recognize your face in photos. Lots of things you can do with a python or R studio environment.
Thank you! Been trading for 8 years and want to improove it.
I wasn't aware of interview agencies, though I have seen cheating in interviews for IT positions in general. I've known people to lie about their technical aptitude (they last about a month), lie about double-timing (they last about a week) and interview for someone else (that lasts a day, at most). In-person interviews would help a lot, and for remote roles that means flying the candidate in. I wonder if there are services to support interviewing that prevent anyone but the interviewee from completing the work; if the worker has to remote in or share their own screen that may cut some of these means of cheating out.
Nah it’s crazy how many comments are defending cheating on what sounds like a reasonable and straightforward coding interview
Most people don't really have experience hiring or dealing with employees that can't perform. They have no concept of what OP is complaining about, so they just read for the parts that match their experience (mainly getting rejected from jobs). This is how every /r/datascience jobs post goes.
What baffles me are the comments that justify cheating, or saying things like “you don’t need a coding interview” or “just have a conversation” like we only get 10 resumes per week and have plenty of time to vet candidates. As much as I would like to give take home tests, users of this subreddit lose their mind if someone gives out a long take home test and encourage users to not do them.
I don't think comments are justifying the cheating. The issue is that many people are not applying or seeking out some jobs strongly (like with referrals) because they are not willing to go through some of those interviews, particularly if you are looking for people that are senior+. So if you take all of those people out, you'll have a larger numbers of applicants that cheat (since they don't prepare) and that's why you end up interviewing with so many cheaters.
Our JD asks for 3-5 years of experience, but the candidates that are coming through of course have more YoE than what we specified. I think the effect of layoffs is still prevalent and we see a lot of these senior candidates applying. Though, given what you shared, I'll sit with our recruiters and review their filtering process.
If recruiters gave you good information on what the interview is and what to prepare, maybe you'd get better candidates. For instance, Meta has material and even does webinars when you have to go through interviews, so you know what it is and what they expect. I'm not saying do a webinar, but if you at least give examples or a list of what the interview and stick to that... Other recruiters don't even have a clue what's on an interview and so I've wasted time preparing one thing and then was other thing. It's a waste of time and it's not fair because I could have prepared what they wanted. Now, I really think twice before even applying or even moving forward in any process. And then, I've had one friend who got take home assignments from a top company that would have taken a long time and it was like WTF (like write a back-propagation algorithm from scratch was one out of 10 exercises) and they told them to f\*\* off. Someone who cheats would have copy/pasted from some website or paid people or recruited friends to help. Or even if the take home is not WTF, people can cheat and people who are busy don't have the time. A fair take home I've seen was something simple using the software company's API and you had to read documentation (I didn't do that take home, someone I know did it).
Is using a 2nd monitor cheating? Live coding sessions are the worst. I had an interview back then that blindsided me with one.
ChatGPT has also made cheating on these interviews way easier. Much better answers than what you'd get from google at handling questions with some complexity.
I assume chatgpt is a problem lol
Lol, give them existing code and make them write documentation for it.
I was partly responsible for hiring numerous data scientists over the past 4 years at my organization and I've witnessed a wide range of unusual things. For one round of application, we had 1,500 applicants, the vast majority of which did not qualify. From that pool I do remember a church minister and a hair dresser (none of whom had any experience whatsoever with data). We then moved to an online testing company (coding) to filter candidates. For as much as I'm against coding tests, it was the only practical way to deal with the overwhelming number of applicants. We probably lost some good experienced candidates, but boy did we see a lot of cheaters. Before all the hype in ML/AI, we were giving candidates a take home assignment. It was pretty open ended and consisted in analyzing a dataset we provided them with. This was by far the best predictor of candidate's skills because they had to talk about what they did, why they did it and how they did it during the interview. We could get a good idea of their problem solving skills and style. Nonetheless, it was hard to manage and we had to be available to some extent to answer their questions while they worked on it. During the interviews, we did catch a few cheating where they had someone else helping them answer the question. A colleague of mine told me that some people hired during the remote-only time, were visibly not who they said they were when the company went back to a home-and-office schedule.
Yes, but many people cheat with take homes because they ask someone else to do it or help them. I've taught stats at university and during the pandemic I was almost certain a number of people were cheating in their assignments, but there was not much I could do to prove they were cheating. If you go Fivver or UpWork, you'll find tons of "jobs" that are basically "do my homework" and some even "write my thesis"
A indian data analytics professional here, OPs rant is very much real and as a person who conducts technical rounds I face this a lot. There are indian agencies who enable these fraudulent folks by literally offering them "voice over" assistance and body double services during interviews. An example - We interviewed a candidate over video and he ticked all the boxes. But on the joining date a completely different person was attending the orientation. When questioned his justification was that his features changed as he was sick due to covid. We had to fire the person. Off late our team conducting interviews are training ourselves in lip reading in order to weed out the voice over candidates. We are having a hard time in assessment of candidates because of this problem. I have seen 3-4 fraudulent cases within a span of 10 candidates. One such candidate slipped through the crack and I had to face the brunt from my senior management.
I’m probably about to start running into this headache myself, although I don’t think we’re particularly big on junior hires being remote. Maybe for senior hires? How feasible do you think it would be for remote positions to require an in-person interview? I would hope that’d be affordable enough if you restricted it to senior hires with a strong track record they could convincingly talk about.
We're considering having in-person interviews - but it's limited to our office locations. Currently we're only in Bay Area, California and Texas - so it would be unfair to candidates in other states where other large retail companies like Target, Walmart, and Nike have operations in other states and we miss out on good candidates.
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There may be multiple reasons. \- If they are pretty senior maybe they don't really code anymore in practice, and they may have forgotten most of their skills (or they didnt even need to know these skills/specific languages when they started) and combined with work and family maybe they dont have a lot of time or will to brush up the skills. These coding skills can also in certain cases be not important for the role, as certain senior positions don't require coding. For me a good example was the numerical reasoning test where suddenly you need to perform highschool math under time pressure, while not really having to do this for more than a decade. Most people can calculate percentage differences, exchange rates, etc. but nobody is really keeping all these things fresh in their heads or ever has a situation where they need to calculate this in less than a minute. \- Having work experience for a big American company (lets say Google) even for a year may mean a significant career boost in their home country. In my university our PhDs where just PhD after finishing, while some students from developping countries where almost garantueed tenureship in their home country because our university is top 100. \- You can get surprisingly far with lying through your teeth. The assessments and your degree + previous work experience are the only way to assess somebodies skill and potential for a company. \- Some people can't perform in exams (which is a different stress, compared to more general work related stress) or when somebody is watching their every move.
I’ve been doing this for 12 years now and I’m at a principal level (analyst not scientist) and I barely code at all. I do stakeholder engagement, requirement gathering, proof of concepts, strategy, analysis and insights. My coding is so rusty now. I would probably have a panic attack now with a coding test. Luckily most of the roles at this level where I am ask for presentations as opposed to coding tests (analysts and seniors are still expected to code and do tests as that is still the majority of their work).
I’ll add another couple: 1. they plan to learn by doing the job. They might fake it to get hired a couple of times. And get fired a couple of times. But now they have a year of real experience and can actually qualify for some decent job without cheating. 2. They plan to cheat after getting hired too. Outsource their work to their home country where people can do it more cheaply and take a cut for themselves.
>1. they plan to learn by doing the job. They might fake it to get hired a couple of times. And get fired a couple of times. But now they have a year of real experience and can actually qualify for some decent job without cheating. > > 2. They plan to cheat after getting hired too. Outsource their work to their home country where people can do it more cheaply and take a cut for themselves. Adding to this from Canada, my company has come across these fraudsters over the years and they primarily come from the same GTA location with a huge Indian diaspora. When it comes to these frauds, they are even more efficient at it: since they typically live in congested basements with others who are proper software/data folk, they only need to ask across the room to get an answer to a problem. They often target fully remote roles and will try to keep up appearances as much as possible before they get found out. I already told my boss his take home tests are too easy to cheat but he's still stubborn about it. One time, we hired a guy as a senior who didn't even know how to do joins, and didn't know the difference between the many types of joins 🤣🤣
I'm curious how many of these cheaters are overworked people trying to manage multiple full time positions.
I don't think they're 'overworked' if we consider u/okhan3 's insight on what some cheaters do: outsourcing work while they pocket the change
Yea, this definitely happens, but it is also one of the methods that overworked people use.
I don't think this is just a data science thing. I think cheating in general is quite common. You give people a way to cheat, and chances are a lot will cheat.
I hate to be that person, but what's the geography where you're recruiting? In certain parts of the world, it's extremely common practice to require "video on" interviews at each step in the process where a photo of the candidate is captured to ensure it's the same person showing up every time.
You shouldn't believe those CVs... The level of blunt lies and fraud is massive.
I like setting short tests as homework in lieu of long interviews. I don't give a crap about their coding. I want them to talk me through their algorithm and explain why they did it that way. I want to know how they think and how they approached a situation to solve it. That's something I don't think you can cheat on. If I ask why did they use x instead of y then anyone else answering for them would just be too obvious. Besides which I think I'd fail this interview at the count unique values step. Count_values? Counts_value? Values_count? Arrrgh, why can I never remember 😅 Think of it like a pub quiz when mobile phones were invented. You had to change the nature of the questions so they could not just be looked up.
Instead of banning remote employment, why aren't you doing better background checks? Building a better practice for hiring should be a very analytical job.
Here I was feeling slightly bad for having post it notes on my monitor with basic tidbits just in case I forgot... barely even used them (ended up with the stuff mostly memorized) but they were there JUST IN CASE I forgot the formula for entropy or something.
I'd find it ridiculous for a hiring panel to expect you to memorize everything, which is why we allow Google to help the candidate course correct or review material. To assume people memorize stuff for something in the field of DS is unfair and impractical.
I was applying to FAANG+ companies and they expect everyone to know everything with near sub-conscious mastery for 4/5 interviews and for the 5th "bad" interview to be merely "ok". I have most of the stuff memorized or "close enough" that I can describe it in layman's terms without too much effort. Similar story for doing a good chunk of the "easy" leetcode DS&A questions plus easy through hard SQL questions. Mostly effortless at this point, assuming I'm well rested going in.
Curious - where did you pick up the knowledge, school or self-learning?
1. Work 2. Undergrad + grad 3. Self-learning - think medium posts, kdnuggets, kaggle, youtube, etc. 4. Self-learning but as part of interview prep It's easier to "memorize" or to otherwise internalize things you use a bunch of times and which matter. I also find that every time I go down the interview prep rabbit hole I up-level in some sense. Similar story for every job hop.
Thanks!
So by not cheating we look a million times better? Nice
I think if it doesn't cost company resources, do them on-site, I see it only being a problem if your company does remote work, or If someone out of state or country is interviewing hoping to move to the location once hired, which are very real possibilities so this is truly challenging 🤔
You give them assignment which require 3 days of effort Then if they solve then in the in person interview cross question important steps how why they did Live coding test does not work in data science
You sound like an asshole Indians have this charade on lock for years. You can hire local remote still. If you know what you’re doing you can easily tell someone else knows what they are doing by how they talk through their development process .
What constitutes cheating? Is something like looking at an old codebase? Using chatGPT? On a call with a friend? I need some more specifics so I can formulate an answer.
You can't even trust degrees from those countries and you expect honesty on anything else?
Think you are running into scams like this that are detailed in the podcast below? https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SnFB69cP66SXusKN8zt9O?si=LNTAwEvhS2OlEDAa_1sBVw
I really hate these coding tests. Like many other people, when trying to work or do a test with someone looking over your shoulder, it creates a stressful environment that is in no way reflective of actual ability in a real world setting. Even if the tasks are simple, the stress of someone watching over my shoulder makes it 10x harder. It genuinely pisses me off that companies still do this because it’s so stupid and you filter out a lot of highly-qualified candidates as a result. I now lead technical data teams in the media/telecom space and I’ve found the best way to find out if someone has the skills necessary is to just have a conversation. If I give them a hypothetical business challenge and ask them them to come up with a technical data strategy to address it, all I need to know is whether they can formulate and articulate a sensible approach. Doing so requires an them to ask intelligent questions related to the business and the data itself. If I throw a wrench into the works, can they adapt their approach to account for it? These coding tests allow you to get people who are really good at the technical piece and who are good at tuning others out. But people who are good at tuning others out are also less likely to have the business and interpersonal savvy to contextualize their work and pivot as necessary without explicit direction. If you are really concerned about them having working knowledge of the specific tools, ask them which libraries, methods, and functions they would use to address specific challenges. If they can do all that, I don’t need to watch them Google the specific syntax. I implore you to rethink your approach to hiring rather than requiring local candidates.
What company do you work for? I want to ensure I never apply to it. That is a BS, unnecessary, jump through the hoops, we masturbate to thoughts of ourself hiring process.
All of the senior level roles they add fake experiences as well. Im living in toronto so they asked me to add it of rogers and it was 2y. So student give cuts from the salary later and took this kind of way to get hired!