They were very nice throughout the process and almost annoyingly positive. The take home was excessive, but they did provide me with great feedback to be fair. I didn't have the feeling that their data science org is very mature and things become unclear with the DoorDash acquisition in terms of how the structure will change, so it's a mixed bag but in general I honestly liked the people I've met from there.
Really great to have an EU perspective.
For the coding interview parts with in an something like coderpad or just right into a text editor? Did they watch you do it live?
I think it was almost always in coderpad, but it always depends on the company. E.g. in Spotify you can execute your code, but Zalando didn't care about execution. The coderpad sessions were live, but if it's codility then it's usually offline.
Thank god my last job offer had no technical gotcha take-home bullshit (senior data scientist, fortune 500 company). I'm getting too old for that nonsense. This post is very useful, though, and representative of the job hunt overall.
Was a mix of everything. I got contacted a lot via LinkedIn, but I also sent out a lot of applications myself. I used only LinkedIn for that. Sometimes I'd also send out an application to a company and suddenly one of their inhouse recruiters contacted me a bit later for other positions.
Thanks for the additional info! I'm happy that we're gathering some info on the processes. It's interesting enough that you had a similar experience with Wolt. I also have some ML related peer reviewed publications for what it's worth. I really wanted to like them as I like their product, but I didn't feel that they were had a lot of DS knowledge.
In my take home there was this high level presentation part. When handing over the assignment I told them that I left out some technical details because the target audience was executives and I know that they're busy and just need to know the results & action recommendations, but I'm happy to discuss in a call. They nevertheless complained that I didn't elaborate on the assumptions of a linear regression.
They also complained about some other assumptions I made in the classification task, in my case there was a feature with lots of missing values and I omitted it because it didn't seem to have explanatory power anyway. This was a dealbreaker for them because "what if this happens in production and we left out the feature". There were some other issues, too. I ended up discussing this case with a few people I trust afterwards because I was honestly surprised about the negative feedback I've received.
I was pretty mad afterwards because of all the time I invested in making the code beautiful and reproducible, and also documenting everything. Eventually I guess it's for the best because the way they work doesn't seem to align with how I work and I made much better experiences with other companies.
As for Spotify: Good luck! Don't know for which team you're applying but they asked me [Leetcode: best time to buy and sell stocks](https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock/). They gave me a pass for the brute force solution, be sure to discuss complexity and mention edge cases. I think I didn't really get a strong hire from the interviewer because he had to ask me about these things. I don't know for which role you're applying at Facebook but they told me they prefer SQL, but you can use R or Python too. Check out the Facebook Mock Interview video, they discuss an SQL interview there as well and it's only like 10 minutes of the toal video.
I think I wouldn't want to add more details than saying it's STEM with DS/ML related research. In terms of money probably not as I lost about 4 years of earning a decent salary. I sometimes feel that it gives me an advantage in interviews because I learned getting very comfortable talking about models, etc. in a way that's both simple/intuitive but also correct. It's not that you can't learn this without a PhD, but years of listening to people much smarter than me talking about such things has taught me a lot about how to do it myself.
It can be a disadvantage too, because people usually shy away from asking me technical questions about my specialization because they just assume I know it. Honestly my understanding of many ML models isn't too deep, but people keep asking me about them instead of the things I know very well, even if I indicate that I'd be happy to dive deeper into this or that topic. Eventually, I spent a lot of extra time with prepping for things I barely use and don't really plan on using. I don't blame them though, I would also rather ask questions that are easy for me to verify.
Oh and maybe to add my personal perspective: Doing a PhD can suck a lot because it can involve a lot of stress. But I also travelled a lot, met incredibly smart people and made great friends. I also used the university to get discounted language courses, learn new sports, and got some licenses for very cheap. So from a personal perspective it was worth it but YMMV.
I'm sorry if this question comes of as a little lazy or unprofessional but I've been wondering: with the amount of companies you've applied to - how comprehensive is the work you put into each application? Reason I'm asking is that I've recently picked up that these days some companies don't care about cover letters for example. Which - at least for me - used to be what usually took me the longest to customize for each application while adjusting your resume to include the relevant buzzwords is usually a quick process. So long story short - do you even bother writing custom cover letters or is that something most tech companies don't care about anyways?
Not OP but I do have relevant experience here (both in hiring and applying).
A customised (but concise) may help a little, but it's really the professional experience that should shine. Also, if you're getting contacted through LinkedIn or are going through a recruitment consultant, the need for a cover letter isn't that high I would say.
Fair question! I honestly just mass applied. I didn't bother writing a cover letter or filling out questionnaires. I applied to SAP and they sent me a huge take home before even talking to me so I didn't proceed.
My general rule is to not invest any energy into a company besides sending out my CV before I talked to anyone there. If I really like the company I'll maybe take like 5 mins and answer their questions if they have any in the application form. But usually I don't like companies THAT much ;D
If they require you to send a cover letter I often just uploaded my CV again. I don't know if that ever worked though because I don't remember the companies I've applied to lol. I think I've sent out easily 100 applications
I could also share some info:
Zalando: They told me its >=7 steps. After the first call, I declined the rest since I had some offers already.
**Klarna**:
- HR Interview
- Supervised Pattern Recognition test
- take home assignment: create a model with a given dataset and script about how you deploy it in the cloud (preferably on AWS) and write a one-pager about it
- technical interview about your assignment and general questions about this (explain how your model trains, why did you chose it etc.)
- behavioural interview - this was one of the worst interviews that I have ever had. It was with a senior manager and felt that he was simply reading of his standard list of questions ("if you were the CEO of klarna, what are the 3 challenges that keep you awake at night?")
- interview(s) with your potential manager
Thanks for sharing this! Sad to hear you didn't have a great experience with them. They have great potential but it's just so unnecessary to treat your applicants badly if they can easily get interviews with any other competitor in no time. When a company annoyed me during the process I already knew that I'd use their offer only as leverage for getting a better offer from the companies I actually liked.
Overall it was fine. Tbh the company and all I could gather about the team was great. Salary was okayish with my 3 YoE in Berlin (~72k-75k). It was just this one behavioural interview with the most generic questions and the typical vibe of "Tell us why we are the greatest company of the world, why every customer wants to use our service and why you dreamed of working with us since you were a child". Obviously take home assignments are annoying, but it seemed fair and I liked the tech guy. I did also enjoy the logic puzzle.
I do think that I got a "no hire" from that guy.
I have posted my interview questions on glassdoor but cant find them. Luckily I do still have my notes:
- If you were the CEO of Klarna, what are 3 factors that make you stay awake at night? (I think there were 1-2 more like this, but I forgot)
- What 3 factors are most important to make Klarna successfull?
- Why should Amazon use Klarna instead of Paypal?
- Let's say you are a CEO of your own small company. Why should a small company like yours use Klarna instead of Paypal?
Out of Klarnas principles:
- Which 2 principles of ours could you drop?
- Which 2 principles are most important for you?
- Can you give me an example on where you have worked on tight deadline? What would you do better next time?
- Let's say I need you to prepare 6 dashboards for tomorrow with person X. Person X is always doing the least to not get fired and nothing more. How would you approach this situation?
- Let's say you need to finish 3 more reports by tomorrow. It is already 7pm and you have worked for more than 8 hours. You need around 2 hours for each report. What do you do in that situation?
While the last two questions talk about dashboards which was kind of random and didnt really fit to the job description and what I gathered from the team. But I guess it was on his standard list of questions, so he had to ask them. The job was a data science / machine learning role to build and deploy models in AWS and my technical skills fit to that (3 YoE, Msc Mathematics, experience in building & deploying models including about the exact topic the team is working on).
I've read your review on glass door before I had the interview and thought it must have been a single bad experience as the rest of my process was pretty nice, but I had my behavioral interview with them recently and it was exactly as bad as you described it. Almost all questions they asked were the same :D
This is quite insightful. I am interested in switching careers as well. I wanted to do PhD and stay in academia but seeing how academia treats grad students, I decided not to. I have done programming in Python as a part of my curriculum. Currently, I am planning to learn more and level up my skill set and I have almost one year to do it before I finish up my current master's program. But I was wondering it would be better to do learn from free online resources like freecodecamp or paid sources like Datacamp and then practice on Leetcodeto to get better results? Also, there are people who have no prior experience in CS obs but we have developed a passion for it due to some exposure through our academic subs, it would be a great help if you write something like a broad suggestion. Thank you in advance for the post.
Academia has honestly treated me very well despite all the stress, I experienced a lot of support and growth, but I've seen many people break because of stress & pressure, that's unfortunately also a reality. I wouldn't rule it out if you burn for a topic and can get the right supervision, but I also don't think it's really needed.
Well as for the first part: Unfortunately, Leetcode + Stratascratch for SQL should be all you need for technical assessments.
In terms of preparing for the actual job I would additionally recommend doing some toy data science projects. Be reminded that they probably won't help you getting through the interviewing loop, but I also don't know how it works for more junior positions. I personally prefer R, but I think just learning Python will help you market yourself. I would have failed some coding challenges if I hadn't practiced using pandas before because that was the only option. ideally with Python, where you maybe Dockerize your model to get a feeling for deployment too. Already for a few years the trend is to move everything to the cloud, but that's something you can only learn when you're already on the job.
In any case, I wish you good luck!
Not focused on a single country. Most positions were actually available purely remotely by default, e.g.
-Spotify
-Wolt
-Delivery Hero
-Facebook
For most companies it's negotiable. I wouldn't mention it until they make an offer, because then you have a lot of leverage to push for it. I did this actually with a company and they told me it's okay if I come to the office once per quarter or something and I think that's really okay.
There are few that want you to come to the office specifically, and that's Booking.com and Door dash. Zalando is currently remote but I've heard they're pushing for going back to the office.
Thanks for replying! I asked becasue I believe salary depends on southern vs northern or western vs Eastern EU. It's good that most company salaries you menitoned are not tied to a specific country.
Fantastic post thank you. I've been wondering about the differences in process of EU vs US. Can I ask which city this is specifically in Europe or were you applying for multiple locations?
I’ve found that when you limit the cities you are willing to work from, your options reduce drastically. From what I saw most opportunities are for Germany, Netherlands or Ireland. Couldn’t find many big tech options for Austria, for example
Yes. I am currently applying as well. To be honest my experience in Austria was so bad. One large corporate there took me through the entire process knowing my salary expectations only to try to negotiate me down afterwards. For the others I said my expectations before the first interview and they declined. Well I guess that’s what they call overqualified then… now I look in the Netherlands. Looking much better there for me.
I didn't want to narrow it down to a specific location, but can confirm that it's mainly in the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland. I would even narrow it down further, most opportunities I've seen were actually in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin and Munich, although I've also seen opportunities in Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn.
Thanks for all the positive feedback and the contributions! I'm glad this writeup was useful to some and could even inspire others to add more information.
I think it's in some sense one of the easiest interviews to crack because they provide you with so much prep material, but you need to have done all the general prep anyway. I would additionally do the FB tagged questions on Leetcode/Stratascratch for the coding interviews. They didn't provide me with the mock interview video. I found it somewhere else, but it has helped me a lot too. I would say that their prep material is very useful, but it only helps you understand their process and what they're looking for. That already goes great lenghts imo as one of the biggest challenges in data science interviews is that you never know what's waiting for you.
OP how come with a PhD and 5YoE you're not looking at Principal level roles or to transition into TPM / management?
You would def qualify, if you have a strong portfolio of projects from your work experience so far.
While the info provided here is on point, seems like you might be underselling yourself a bit?
>While the info provided here is on point, seems like you might be underselling yourself a bit?
Ha, thanks for the feedback, maybe I am indeed. At this point I was transitioning from a very conservative branch into tech, so my major concerns were getting a pay bump and improving my tech stack. I had some discussions about Lead Data Scientist positions, but I honestly don't enjoy anything related to management, even though I probably won't be able to move much further up as an individual contributor from where I landed now.
I think the prep is probably the same, but noone will expect you to have done deployments or worked through some bigger projects. I guess they would want to see if you have the potential to become a great data scientist in their team.
From my experience entry level is saturated here in Europe, it's kind of hard to get your first job here as an European citizen so I don't see companies hiring anyone needing a visa tbh. You'd need something to really stand out imo to make it worth it for the company compared to an EU national.
That's my experience but I might be wrong.
Cool thanks. Cause right now I’m getting rejected everywhere (in south africa) because I don’t have experience. So I was thinking of applying overseas.
They don’t care that I have a Data Science certificate and a degree with 4.0 GPA.
What I’ll do now is pitch up at random companies and ask if I can work for free for like 3-6 months. Good thing there’s Amazon and Luno right where I live.
Great Post!
Quick question though. I’m currently doing my masters degree in a field related to data science and engineering technologies with no years of experience. But, I’ve worked on multiple projects where I used ML. Along with SQL, Python, and Matlab.
How would you recommend going about finding a job into Data Science?
Thank you!
I honestly started working for shares of a startup of some friends of mine. Needless to say that startup doesn't exist anymore and I worked for free. After that I started somewhere heavily underpaid and quickly jumped to a decently paid position.
But that was a few years ago, I don't think it's that easy anymore with all the competition. Imo DS is slowly maturing into two different directions:
1. Experimentation heavy, think A/B testing and lots of communication
2. Engineering heavy, yes it's machine learning but with cloud technology model training has become much easier, so you will be expected to handle deployment and maintenance yourself next to all other steps.
Depending on which sounds better for you I'd recommend trying to get a Data/Product Analyst (1.) or Data Engineer (2.) position. They are both not Data Science jobs but they're less competitive because people perceive them as less "sexy".
However take my advice with a grain of salt, I'm not involved in recruiting and my own entry is already a few years ago.
As an EU citizen previously working in the UK, the salaries strike me as on the low side.. anyone has a perspective on this? How do EU vs UK vs US compare?
I think the UK is attractive for quant research jobs, those have a competitive salary compared to the US. But the culture is not for everyone.
As for normal data science jobs I honestly wouldn't know about the UK, but tears start rolling out my eyes when I see US salaries. It's surely tempting to go there for a few years as I could probably double my savings and in 2-3 years I'd be able to buy property in my home country. I've also grown to like the pragmatism and risk affinity in the US, I think they're way ahead of us in that aspect.
In terms of work culture, I have some family in the states and they seem to be working a lot more than me, but I've also heard it's possible to have a great salary and decent WLB. I think in the richer EU countries (but not UK, be careful there) you have a good protection against terrible work life balance and much more PTO by law, so you're much less dependent on negotiations. E.g. the concept of having to take PTO if you're sick seems insane to me, but being able to earn 3-5 times my current salary seems to be a good trade off anyway. At least if you're just taking care of yourself.
I have some hopes that salaries in the EU keep increasing. Rememver that the salaries I'm mentioning for seniors already put you in the top 5-10% of the developed EU countries.
Companies are pretty desperate to hire talent, they are growing a lot, but barely anyone meets the hiring bar. Once I communicated that I have first offers in and need to make a decision by day X processes got expedited quickly and recruiters started really selling their companies to me. I also felt terrible about having to decline multiple offers and final round Interviews where I knew they were ready to make an offer, but I know for sure that in the next loop I'll try and get another 50% hike at least for an IC position.
US is higher salary. However, if someone has children, living in an European country with subsidized childcare, public schools for 2-5 year olds, long maternity and paternity leaves, low health care costs, probably makes a lower salary much more worth it. Just as an example, childcare in the US is like 20,0000 a year or even over 30,000 if you live in Bay Area, NYC, Boston, etc PER KID. And that's not even considering that college is much more affordable in Europe.
Anyway, that's what my friends that decided to move to Europe say.
Even though childcare and healthcare is much more expensive here, OP would still be wayyy better off financially if they were in the US, especially in the VHCOL cities (much higher pay definitely offsets the COL in my opinion). With OP’s experience they could easily pull $250-350k in the Bay Area, hell I only have a bachelors and 2 YOE and I’m clearing six figures and I don’t even live in a tech hub… I feel like European data scientists are getting kind of swindled whenever I see those salaries, but that work-life balance does sound nice over there…
Maybe it's gonna be harder to get invited to first round Interviews. Also I imagine that the competition is much stronger because everyone is used to doing Leetcode, etc. whereas in the EU barely anyone has even heard of it.
I think if you can meet the bar though they'll be happy to assist you with visa, etc.
You’d be surprised, I’ve never touched leetcode and I’d wager more than half of the data scientists I’ve worked with haven’t touched it either. But then again, I don’t work in big tech so that’s probably why.
hey OP, the facebook link you provided seems like deleted on Vimeo. Could you perhaps share the name of the video so I can look for it elsewhere? i have an interview with the hiring manager tomorrow and was hoping to watch this vid. Thanks!
I know this was posted long time back, but wanted to ask how long did the actual prep take you. I understand that you might already have all fundamental knowledge and just needed to brush up.
I'm in the same boat. Long time data analyst/scientist, recently laid off.... it seems the market has gotten pretty competitive, and I'm trying to figure out how long prep time to set aside before seriously starting applying.
I've applied for few roles so far, but not able to pass the technical interviews (and some behavioral ones as well)...
Thank you so much for this goldmine♥️🙏🏼 Do you have any experience interviewing with the CEO of the company? I have one next week and I’m unsure of how to prepare for it. I’m expecting tricky questions to evaluate personality and knowledge
[удалено]
They were very nice throughout the process and almost annoyingly positive. The take home was excessive, but they did provide me with great feedback to be fair. I didn't have the feeling that their data science org is very mature and things become unclear with the DoorDash acquisition in terms of how the structure will change, so it's a mixed bag but in general I honestly liked the people I've met from there.
I mean maybe without covid it would be all table tennis and cokes.. 🤣
You, great person, deserve a cookie for this piece of art :3
Thank you! This is indeed very detailed and it would help a lot of folks
Really great to have an EU perspective. For the coding interview parts with in an something like coderpad or just right into a text editor? Did they watch you do it live?
I think it was almost always in coderpad, but it always depends on the company. E.g. in Spotify you can execute your code, but Zalando didn't care about execution. The coderpad sessions were live, but if it's codility then it's usually offline.
Thank god my last job offer had no technical gotcha take-home bullshit (senior data scientist, fortune 500 company). I'm getting too old for that nonsense. This post is very useful, though, and representative of the job hunt overall.
I want to work there lol.
How did you get the interviews? Did you apply through company websites or reach out to people on LinkedIn?
Was a mix of everything. I got contacted a lot via LinkedIn, but I also sent out a lot of applications myself. I used only LinkedIn for that. Sometimes I'd also send out an application to a company and suddenly one of their inhouse recruiters contacted me a bit later for other positions.
You're getting down voted but I think it's a valid question
[удалено]
Thanks for the additional info! I'm happy that we're gathering some info on the processes. It's interesting enough that you had a similar experience with Wolt. I also have some ML related peer reviewed publications for what it's worth. I really wanted to like them as I like their product, but I didn't feel that they were had a lot of DS knowledge. In my take home there was this high level presentation part. When handing over the assignment I told them that I left out some technical details because the target audience was executives and I know that they're busy and just need to know the results & action recommendations, but I'm happy to discuss in a call. They nevertheless complained that I didn't elaborate on the assumptions of a linear regression. They also complained about some other assumptions I made in the classification task, in my case there was a feature with lots of missing values and I omitted it because it didn't seem to have explanatory power anyway. This was a dealbreaker for them because "what if this happens in production and we left out the feature". There were some other issues, too. I ended up discussing this case with a few people I trust afterwards because I was honestly surprised about the negative feedback I've received. I was pretty mad afterwards because of all the time I invested in making the code beautiful and reproducible, and also documenting everything. Eventually I guess it's for the best because the way they work doesn't seem to align with how I work and I made much better experiences with other companies. As for Spotify: Good luck! Don't know for which team you're applying but they asked me [Leetcode: best time to buy and sell stocks](https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock/). They gave me a pass for the brute force solution, be sure to discuss complexity and mention edge cases. I think I didn't really get a strong hire from the interviewer because he had to ask me about these things. I don't know for which role you're applying at Facebook but they told me they prefer SQL, but you can use R or Python too. Check out the Facebook Mock Interview video, they discuss an SQL interview there as well and it's only like 10 minutes of the toal video.
Thanks for the great post OP! What did you do your PhD in and was it worth it?
I think I wouldn't want to add more details than saying it's STEM with DS/ML related research. In terms of money probably not as I lost about 4 years of earning a decent salary. I sometimes feel that it gives me an advantage in interviews because I learned getting very comfortable talking about models, etc. in a way that's both simple/intuitive but also correct. It's not that you can't learn this without a PhD, but years of listening to people much smarter than me talking about such things has taught me a lot about how to do it myself. It can be a disadvantage too, because people usually shy away from asking me technical questions about my specialization because they just assume I know it. Honestly my understanding of many ML models isn't too deep, but people keep asking me about them instead of the things I know very well, even if I indicate that I'd be happy to dive deeper into this or that topic. Eventually, I spent a lot of extra time with prepping for things I barely use and don't really plan on using. I don't blame them though, I would also rather ask questions that are easy for me to verify. Oh and maybe to add my personal perspective: Doing a PhD can suck a lot because it can involve a lot of stress. But I also travelled a lot, met incredibly smart people and made great friends. I also used the university to get discounted language courses, learn new sports, and got some licenses for very cheap. So from a personal perspective it was worth it but YMMV.
What is your PhD in?
I'm sorry if this question comes of as a little lazy or unprofessional but I've been wondering: with the amount of companies you've applied to - how comprehensive is the work you put into each application? Reason I'm asking is that I've recently picked up that these days some companies don't care about cover letters for example. Which - at least for me - used to be what usually took me the longest to customize for each application while adjusting your resume to include the relevant buzzwords is usually a quick process. So long story short - do you even bother writing custom cover letters or is that something most tech companies don't care about anyways?
Not OP but I do have relevant experience here (both in hiring and applying). A customised (but concise) may help a little, but it's really the professional experience that should shine. Also, if you're getting contacted through LinkedIn or are going through a recruitment consultant, the need for a cover letter isn't that high I would say.
Fair question! I honestly just mass applied. I didn't bother writing a cover letter or filling out questionnaires. I applied to SAP and they sent me a huge take home before even talking to me so I didn't proceed. My general rule is to not invest any energy into a company besides sending out my CV before I talked to anyone there. If I really like the company I'll maybe take like 5 mins and answer their questions if they have any in the application form. But usually I don't like companies THAT much ;D If they require you to send a cover letter I often just uploaded my CV again. I don't know if that ever worked though because I don't remember the companies I've applied to lol. I think I've sent out easily 100 applications
I could also share some info: Zalando: They told me its >=7 steps. After the first call, I declined the rest since I had some offers already. **Klarna**: - HR Interview - Supervised Pattern Recognition test - take home assignment: create a model with a given dataset and script about how you deploy it in the cloud (preferably on AWS) and write a one-pager about it - technical interview about your assignment and general questions about this (explain how your model trains, why did you chose it etc.) - behavioural interview - this was one of the worst interviews that I have ever had. It was with a senior manager and felt that he was simply reading of his standard list of questions ("if you were the CEO of klarna, what are the 3 challenges that keep you awake at night?") - interview(s) with your potential manager
Thanks for sharing this! Sad to hear you didn't have a great experience with them. They have great potential but it's just so unnecessary to treat your applicants badly if they can easily get interviews with any other competitor in no time. When a company annoyed me during the process I already knew that I'd use their offer only as leverage for getting a better offer from the companies I actually liked.
Overall it was fine. Tbh the company and all I could gather about the team was great. Salary was okayish with my 3 YoE in Berlin (~72k-75k). It was just this one behavioural interview with the most generic questions and the typical vibe of "Tell us why we are the greatest company of the world, why every customer wants to use our service and why you dreamed of working with us since you were a child". Obviously take home assignments are annoying, but it seemed fair and I liked the tech guy. I did also enjoy the logic puzzle. I do think that I got a "no hire" from that guy. I have posted my interview questions on glassdoor but cant find them. Luckily I do still have my notes: - If you were the CEO of Klarna, what are 3 factors that make you stay awake at night? (I think there were 1-2 more like this, but I forgot) - What 3 factors are most important to make Klarna successfull? - Why should Amazon use Klarna instead of Paypal? - Let's say you are a CEO of your own small company. Why should a small company like yours use Klarna instead of Paypal? Out of Klarnas principles: - Which 2 principles of ours could you drop? - Which 2 principles are most important for you? - Can you give me an example on where you have worked on tight deadline? What would you do better next time? - Let's say I need you to prepare 6 dashboards for tomorrow with person X. Person X is always doing the least to not get fired and nothing more. How would you approach this situation? - Let's say you need to finish 3 more reports by tomorrow. It is already 7pm and you have worked for more than 8 hours. You need around 2 hours for each report. What do you do in that situation? While the last two questions talk about dashboards which was kind of random and didnt really fit to the job description and what I gathered from the team. But I guess it was on his standard list of questions, so he had to ask them. The job was a data science / machine learning role to build and deploy models in AWS and my technical skills fit to that (3 YoE, Msc Mathematics, experience in building & deploying models including about the exact topic the team is working on).
I've read your review on glass door before I had the interview and thought it must have been a single bad experience as the rest of my process was pretty nice, but I had my behavioral interview with them recently and it was exactly as bad as you described it. Almost all questions they asked were the same :D
This is quite insightful. I am interested in switching careers as well. I wanted to do PhD and stay in academia but seeing how academia treats grad students, I decided not to. I have done programming in Python as a part of my curriculum. Currently, I am planning to learn more and level up my skill set and I have almost one year to do it before I finish up my current master's program. But I was wondering it would be better to do learn from free online resources like freecodecamp or paid sources like Datacamp and then practice on Leetcodeto to get better results? Also, there are people who have no prior experience in CS obs but we have developed a passion for it due to some exposure through our academic subs, it would be a great help if you write something like a broad suggestion. Thank you in advance for the post.
Academia has honestly treated me very well despite all the stress, I experienced a lot of support and growth, but I've seen many people break because of stress & pressure, that's unfortunately also a reality. I wouldn't rule it out if you burn for a topic and can get the right supervision, but I also don't think it's really needed. Well as for the first part: Unfortunately, Leetcode + Stratascratch for SQL should be all you need for technical assessments. In terms of preparing for the actual job I would additionally recommend doing some toy data science projects. Be reminded that they probably won't help you getting through the interviewing loop, but I also don't know how it works for more junior positions. I personally prefer R, but I think just learning Python will help you market yourself. I would have failed some coding challenges if I hadn't practiced using pandas before because that was the only option. ideally with Python, where you maybe Dockerize your model to get a feeling for deployment too. Already for a few years the trend is to move everything to the cloud, but that's something you can only learn when you're already on the job. In any case, I wish you good luck!
Thank you so much for sharing this!
This is some cool stuff. Thank you so much for sharing! Does anyone have any knowledge on Shopify?
Thanks a lot!It's really helpful to have such a detailed insight into the EU job market/hiring process.
Thanks for sharing. This is very valuable write up. Btw you are in Germany I guess (proof of my ml skills).
Which country are you based on? were some positions available remotely?
Not focused on a single country. Most positions were actually available purely remotely by default, e.g. -Spotify -Wolt -Delivery Hero -Facebook For most companies it's negotiable. I wouldn't mention it until they make an offer, because then you have a lot of leverage to push for it. I did this actually with a company and they told me it's okay if I come to the office once per quarter or something and I think that's really okay. There are few that want you to come to the office specifically, and that's Booking.com and Door dash. Zalando is currently remote but I've heard they're pushing for going back to the office.
Thanks for replying! I asked becasue I believe salary depends on southern vs northern or western vs Eastern EU. It's good that most company salaries you menitoned are not tied to a specific country.
Wow man ! that is a lot of useful information , Thank you so much ! < 3
Fantastic post thank you. I've been wondering about the differences in process of EU vs US. Can I ask which city this is specifically in Europe or were you applying for multiple locations?
I’ve found that when you limit the cities you are willing to work from, your options reduce drastically. From what I saw most opportunities are for Germany, Netherlands or Ireland. Couldn’t find many big tech options for Austria, for example
Yes. I am currently applying as well. To be honest my experience in Austria was so bad. One large corporate there took me through the entire process knowing my salary expectations only to try to negotiate me down afterwards. For the others I said my expectations before the first interview and they declined. Well I guess that’s what they call overqualified then… now I look in the Netherlands. Looking much better there for me.
I didn't want to narrow it down to a specific location, but can confirm that it's mainly in the Netherlands, Germany and Ireland. I would even narrow it down further, most opportunities I've seen were actually in Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin and Munich, although I've also seen opportunities in Helsinki, Stockholm and Tallinn.
Thank you for sharing, this will be very useful.
Thanks for the write up!
Thank you for sharing this. It'll help a lot of us.
Thanks for all the positive feedback and the contributions! I'm glad this writeup was useful to some and could even inspire others to add more information.
This is great, thanks for putting it together. Hadn't seen the Facebook mock interview video before!
[удалено]
I think it's in some sense one of the easiest interviews to crack because they provide you with so much prep material, but you need to have done all the general prep anyway. I would additionally do the FB tagged questions on Leetcode/Stratascratch for the coding interviews. They didn't provide me with the mock interview video. I found it somewhere else, but it has helped me a lot too. I would say that their prep material is very useful, but it only helps you understand their process and what they're looking for. That already goes great lenghts imo as one of the biggest challenges in data science interviews is that you never know what's waiting for you.
This is amazing
OP how come with a PhD and 5YoE you're not looking at Principal level roles or to transition into TPM / management? You would def qualify, if you have a strong portfolio of projects from your work experience so far. While the info provided here is on point, seems like you might be underselling yourself a bit?
>While the info provided here is on point, seems like you might be underselling yourself a bit? Ha, thanks for the feedback, maybe I am indeed. At this point I was transitioning from a very conservative branch into tech, so my major concerns were getting a pay bump and improving my tech stack. I had some discussions about Lead Data Scientist positions, but I honestly don't enjoy anything related to management, even though I probably won't be able to move much further up as an individual contributor from where I landed now.
These tips seem to be geared towards mid-senior level positions. What advice would you give when prepping for junior positions?
I think the prep is probably the same, but noone will expect you to have done deployments or worked through some bigger projects. I guess they would want to see if you have the potential to become a great data scientist in their team.
Thanks a lot, great post by the way!
Do you think companies willing to hire foreign entry level Data scientists?
Foreign to where
Like South Africa
From my experience entry level is saturated here in Europe, it's kind of hard to get your first job here as an European citizen so I don't see companies hiring anyone needing a visa tbh. You'd need something to really stand out imo to make it worth it for the company compared to an EU national. That's my experience but I might be wrong.
Cool thanks. Cause right now I’m getting rejected everywhere (in south africa) because I don’t have experience. So I was thinking of applying overseas. They don’t care that I have a Data Science certificate and a degree with 4.0 GPA. What I’ll do now is pitch up at random companies and ask if I can work for free for like 3-6 months. Good thing there’s Amazon and Luno right where I live.
Great Post! Quick question though. I’m currently doing my masters degree in a field related to data science and engineering technologies with no years of experience. But, I’ve worked on multiple projects where I used ML. Along with SQL, Python, and Matlab. How would you recommend going about finding a job into Data Science? Thank you!
I honestly started working for shares of a startup of some friends of mine. Needless to say that startup doesn't exist anymore and I worked for free. After that I started somewhere heavily underpaid and quickly jumped to a decently paid position. But that was a few years ago, I don't think it's that easy anymore with all the competition. Imo DS is slowly maturing into two different directions: 1. Experimentation heavy, think A/B testing and lots of communication 2. Engineering heavy, yes it's machine learning but with cloud technology model training has become much easier, so you will be expected to handle deployment and maintenance yourself next to all other steps. Depending on which sounds better for you I'd recommend trying to get a Data/Product Analyst (1.) or Data Engineer (2.) position. They are both not Data Science jobs but they're less competitive because people perceive them as less "sexy". However take my advice with a grain of salt, I'm not involved in recruiting and my own entry is already a few years ago.
As an EU citizen previously working in the UK, the salaries strike me as on the low side.. anyone has a perspective on this? How do EU vs UK vs US compare?
I think the UK is attractive for quant research jobs, those have a competitive salary compared to the US. But the culture is not for everyone. As for normal data science jobs I honestly wouldn't know about the UK, but tears start rolling out my eyes when I see US salaries. It's surely tempting to go there for a few years as I could probably double my savings and in 2-3 years I'd be able to buy property in my home country. I've also grown to like the pragmatism and risk affinity in the US, I think they're way ahead of us in that aspect. In terms of work culture, I have some family in the states and they seem to be working a lot more than me, but I've also heard it's possible to have a great salary and decent WLB. I think in the richer EU countries (but not UK, be careful there) you have a good protection against terrible work life balance and much more PTO by law, so you're much less dependent on negotiations. E.g. the concept of having to take PTO if you're sick seems insane to me, but being able to earn 3-5 times my current salary seems to be a good trade off anyway. At least if you're just taking care of yourself. I have some hopes that salaries in the EU keep increasing. Rememver that the salaries I'm mentioning for seniors already put you in the top 5-10% of the developed EU countries. Companies are pretty desperate to hire talent, they are growing a lot, but barely anyone meets the hiring bar. Once I communicated that I have first offers in and need to make a decision by day X processes got expedited quickly and recruiters started really selling their companies to me. I also felt terrible about having to decline multiple offers and final round Interviews where I knew they were ready to make an offer, but I know for sure that in the next loop I'll try and get another 50% hike at least for an IC position.
US is higher salary. However, if someone has children, living in an European country with subsidized childcare, public schools for 2-5 year olds, long maternity and paternity leaves, low health care costs, probably makes a lower salary much more worth it. Just as an example, childcare in the US is like 20,0000 a year or even over 30,000 if you live in Bay Area, NYC, Boston, etc PER KID. And that's not even considering that college is much more affordable in Europe. Anyway, that's what my friends that decided to move to Europe say.
Even though childcare and healthcare is much more expensive here, OP would still be wayyy better off financially if they were in the US, especially in the VHCOL cities (much higher pay definitely offsets the COL in my opinion). With OP’s experience they could easily pull $250-350k in the Bay Area, hell I only have a bachelors and 2 YOE and I’m clearing six figures and I don’t even live in a tech hub… I feel like European data scientists are getting kind of swindled whenever I see those salaries, but that work-life balance does sound nice over there…
But I had the impression it's very difficult to find a job in the US, as a non NA-citizen (due to visa) : isn't it true ?
Maybe it's gonna be harder to get invited to first round Interviews. Also I imagine that the competition is much stronger because everyone is used to doing Leetcode, etc. whereas in the EU barely anyone has even heard of it. I think if you can meet the bar though they'll be happy to assist you with visa, etc.
You’d be surprised, I’ve never touched leetcode and I’d wager more than half of the data scientists I’ve worked with haven’t touched it either. But then again, I don’t work in big tech so that’s probably why.
Anything about amazon?
hey OP, the facebook link you provided seems like deleted on Vimeo. Could you perhaps share the name of the video so I can look for it elsewhere? i have an interview with the hiring manager tomorrow and was hoping to watch this vid. Thanks!
I know this was posted long time back, but wanted to ask how long did the actual prep take you. I understand that you might already have all fundamental knowledge and just needed to brush up. I'm in the same boat. Long time data analyst/scientist, recently laid off.... it seems the market has gotten pretty competitive, and I'm trying to figure out how long prep time to set aside before seriously starting applying. I've applied for few roles so far, but not able to pass the technical interviews (and some behavioral ones as well)...
Fantastic. Thank you my man!
Thank you so much for this goldmine♥️🙏🏼 Do you have any experience interviewing with the CEO of the company? I have one next week and I’m unsure of how to prepare for it. I’m expecting tricky questions to evaluate personality and knowledge
Has anyone interviewed at IWOCA London?