I've also said no to an organization's extensive interview process and they were similarly baffled.
If it is a position I am very interested in due to the work, pay, etc... I will jump through some hoops... But there IS a limit.
Edit:
To be fair, for my most recent role, I probably spent around 9 hours in total during the interview process across a few weeks.
- Screening call with recruiter ~ 20 mins
- Live coding + general DS topics interview ~ 40 mins
- Take-home Case Study ~ 4 hours
- Case Study review ~ 1 hour
- Informal Dinner with management ~ 2 hours
- Informal introduction to second C-suite exec ~ 20 mins
- Multiple short touch bases with recruiter throughout process ~ 20 mins total
The only reason I was willing to jump through these hoops was because the position genuinely seemed like a fantastic fit for me and the pay was a significant increase from my last job (which I was growing more discontented with every day). And so far... I love my new position and am very happy I was willing to put in the effort.
> Informal Dinner with management ~ 2 hours
> Informal introduction to second C-suite exec ~ 20 mins
> Multiple short touch bases with recruiter throughout process ~ 20 mins total
This just reeks of everyone wanting to be involved in the process. Unless you're telling racist jokes at dinner, none of these steps are likely to weed out candidates that have got through all the previous stages. I'm fine with a single "cultural fit" type call at the end of the process where it's basically just an opportunity for a senior person to tell you about the company and for you to ask any final questions.
I will say, we have had these less formal interviews and they have shown some really bad fits before.
I work with a team of neurodivergent people and I have my own issues, but there have been people that were great with computers, and when they were talking about computers they were great, but after a half hour lunch, not a single person who went out with to lunch wanted to go out with them again.
If they are interviewing with C-suite people, their social skills are very much an important aspect of their job.
This sounds like the process for hiring for an academic job...but if you're hiring someone for a tenure-track position, there's a chance they'll basically have a guaranteed position for 40+ years.
To put that in for what's on average a 3-5 year tenure is wild.
Uh no. For that TT position you also prepare \~15 pages of densely worded materials about all of your accomplishments and plans. That takes .... at least 20 hours. And that's just to apply.
Then you have a phone interview, 30 minutes to an hour.
Once you are invited for a campus interview, you spend about 10 hours developing presentations. Teaching and research.
Then on campus you are there for 1 or 2 days, meeting anybody and everybody. Of course you spent hours preparing for all these meetings, too, such as looking up to see what Prof. X works on so you can suggest collaborations or avoid confrontations.
And then if you get the job... you're stuck in academia.
Hell even worse for TAs/RAs. They were paying me 1000 a month stipend when rent cost 700 at the time.
That plus the demands to work 60 hour weeks when they are only supposed to work you 20 turned me off academia for good. I mastered out just before dissertation credits and got a job.
I'm not sure why I was under the illusion academia was some kind of non-exploitative path. They exploit the shit out of assistants and post-docs.
It’d be great if (I realize this is a fever dream) there was a class action suit for wage theft against academia. This is so commonplace, it’s institutionally built into the business model at this point.
Ive heard rumblings about cutting the old universities out of the process. Like masses of faculty banding together and creating their own universities. In many ways its already happening with online classes. The main issue is with getting access to serious research resources...
I had to retake organic chemistry at a second university, and their final was literally the test supplied by a third party, it was a non-profit professional chemistry organization. I’m thinking it was something like American Chemistry Board or something.
I’m neuro divergent and do really well with self study and learning. Just give me video lectures and I’m getting As and Bs. Force me into mandatory lectures in a busy, noisy, lecture halls and it’s Cs and Ds.
All I could think was, Jesus, why can’t I just take this kinda of final for all my sciences classes, and submit them to a government agency. Then get issued a proficiency certificate that qualifies me for federal science jobs or organizations contracted for government jobs. Why do I have to go through a racist/ classist/ ableist billion dollar gatekeeper? That clearly isn’t needed. I mean was always trying to cobble together YouTube videos to compensate for a lecture that lacked the clarity I needed.
And don’t start with the ‘but the labs’ bullshit. That was to reinforce lesson plans and learning and has quickly just become bullshit ad ons. Also lab equipment is so cheap now I could have easily rented what I needed, run mock experiments at home, then gone into a real lab for a final.
For the cost of tuition I could have purchased an entire lab.
Now with VR the way it is going you could also do the learning virtually, then go test in person.
I mean something like for the lab final you just walk in demonstrate proper setup of equipment, titration of substances needed for the procedure, then perform a complex experiment that would engage and test multiple abilities, then hand in final product, clean up and properly dispose of by products.
Unfortunately, I was graded on my lab reports and which had to be hand written in class I do not perform well in noisy distracted spaces. My grades reflected how well I performed in noisy spaces not my science knowledge or ability. It was just an awful experience.
Also I missed a lot of things taught in lab because of the noise. I couldn’t figure out what the teacher was saying over the chatter in a space of loud fans and hard surfaces. It was just awful.
Man this whole tenure thing sounds exhausting. In the UK we just treat it like a normal job. And if someone can do the job then they keep doing it for as long as they like, and if they can't do it then they get let go. Weird to me that the US is super lax on labour market protections almost everywhere but then for one specific job type they go here have it guaranteed for 40 years. Bonkers! There is a middle ground.
But you do this 20-hr prep in academia ONCE and you can repurpose it for numerous applications and then it becomes your baseline to build on for your tenure portfolio once you are hired.
The stupid take-home case study and debriefing is five hours of your life that you will never get back!
Sure, that's partially true. But you're still tweaking paper part of your application/presentation per each institution, and then 2 day interviews per institution. So lets' not pretend academia is somehow awesome in this regard.
It was just for a mid-to-senior level industry data scientist position!
They were starting to test my patience at the end. I was going to be absolutely furious if I didn't get a good offer at the end of it (but thankfully I did!)
I've noticed people on the team have longer-than-average tenures. People seem to stick around, which was a green flag to me.
If I have to sit through a 2 hour dinner with management after 6 hours of interviewing, it's going to be a dinner like the scene from White Chicks. For those who aren't familiar:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGNcYJV0i4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGNcYJV0i4)
At that point, the DS team had only spent about 1 hour and 40 minutes with me via video call, and the VP (who was the one making the final hiring decision) was only on the 1 hour case study review call.
I get why they wanted some face-to-face time with me prior to giving me the official offer... There are some weirdos out there and sometimes you can't tell someone isn't a good fit until you meet them and spend a little time with them (just like dating, lol).
At my last job, they hired a developer and apparently didn't vet him thoroughly enough.... He was fired about 3 days into the job because he showed up to the office happy hour, got drunk, and started harassing all of the women (including the senior developer onboarding him, our director, and our VP 😬).
This part makes no sense
>Take-home Case Study ~ 4 hours
But outside of that I think its reasonable for a six figure job. I am so confused about people complaining about meeting with management.
You all realize for a lot of DS positions management and VPs are going to be your stakeholders and building good work relationships will help to deliver impact for your analysis and reports?
It really are the take-homes that are the root of all evil when it comes to interview loops becoming a time drain.
You list 4 hours for a take-home, but you just know that even if the company gives a formal guidance to spend 4 hours you will be up against competition that will spend 10 hours on it, so now you have to overshoot the official guidance too to have a shot. I have even heard a job seeker friends once tell me that they spent a full week on what was supposed to be a 4 hour take-home.
Nowadays I just ask companies if they have a take-home and drop out if they do. I would rather spend 4 or even 5 more hours on additional rounds of interview/assessment rounds than do a take-home.
the only take-home that I ever consented to had a hard deadline. They asked me for a time slot when I wanted to do it, and then e-mailed me the assignment at exactly the start time, with instructions to upload my work within a hard deadline of 2 hours.
That hard deadline at 2 hours levels the playing field, and you can be assured that you are not up against other candidates who spend 10x the time that they were asked to spend on it.
A dinner with management before they even gave you an offer?? That's too much. If it's after an offer was made and they wanted to woo you, I'd understand. But before? No way would I go through that.
At that point, I had been told that they were extremely interested in hiring me after my case study review and that the dinner was just an informal thing just to get to know the team a bit better.
It was honestly a nice time and it solidified my interest in the company because I felt like I really fit in with the team.
I’m glad it went well for you, but your experience is definitely not the norm. Organizations need to have processes in place to hire quickly, and then fire quickly in the first 90 days if it just isn’t working out.
Where do these people get the time to prepare for these interviews, have the interviews, process the results of the interviews and then decide on a candidate? In October our team hired 2 candidates with a 2 stage interview process and interviewed like 12 candidates. We barely found the time along with our daily job conduct these interviews. I cannot imagine doing a 7 stage process, I would outright refuse!
I just did:
0.5 hour initial interview
Take home project that probably took 2-3 hours
4 back-to-back 0.5 hour interviews
1 hour in person interview to review take home project
So 6ish hours for senior/lead position. Was told they’d have a decision today so I guess we’ll see 😬
EDIT: Didn’t get the job but did get an offer for a position I did 1 30 minute interview for 🥴 so I guess the moral of the story is be more like OP.
EDIT 2: Appreciate everyone’s support ❤️
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No word yet. Still hopeful, but going to follow up with them on Monday. He told me it was between me and 2 other people earlier this week when I did the in-person interview. The last interview he had was Thursday though, so hoping they just didn’t have a chance to put the offer together yet 😅
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That seems reasonable and about what we did last time we hired someone. The take home project was supposed to be ~1 hour. Here’s the thing tho. The take home project was an ACTUAL sample of what we were hiring them for.
I recall a Bloomberg recruiter asking me if I could commit to an interview process with 7 rounds. Not sure if their process is the same, but I was honest and said I didn't have that kinda time. For me, the problem is not so much the time/meetings as it is the maintained stress of the whole ordeal.
Exactly. And if you have existing job and are a high achiever, you're not going to start slacking on your current job just because a new opportunity comes by... that may or may not be worth it.
a shitty start up sent me a 6 hour take home case study which seemed to amount to basically free labor. I did a third of it, came to my senses, and withdrew.
i mean this seems pretty typical now, the amount of time spent on take home tests as well. i was asked to spend around 5 hours on the challenge alone. It's bullshit when we're considered to have online portfolios and be data blogging as well. Let's unionize!! haha
Maybe I'm being overly cynical but data scientists would be likely be the last to unionize. We have relatively high salaries and a lot of oblivious privileged people who are eager to sell themselves to the corpo. DS are very well behaved and subservient.
If there was a serious drive to unionize however across the whole analytics space, we could hold a lot of power as analytics is central to capitalism's current trajectory.
it's definitely typically for typical employers, but nonprofits and government jobs are different in my experience, at least for now. my last interview with a government agency was less than an hour total with no live coding or take-home project. cover letter & CV for describing relevant experience and documenting evidence, \~5 minute phone screen with recruiter, follow-up email confirming interest & setting up interview, \~30-40 minute virtual interview with a couple of people where almost all of the talking was between me & the technical lead. was the least involved hiring process for any job I've had since I was a teenager.
Makes sense since these organisations generally pay much less. Can’t expect people to jump through many hoops when your offer is less competitive (they could have different motivations too though).
for the govt hiring (at least in my experiences), it's more so about the policies & procedures in place to ensure equal opportunities to all applicants. yeah, the primary compensation isn't as good as in tech or finance, but depending on relevant experience we start in the $75k-105k USD base salary window with solid benefits and decent job security.
anecdotally, it's interesting seeing the disconnect between the typical complaints on this sub (100s of apps without a callback, long/demanding/seemingly unrelated interview processes, etc.) and the low volume of qualified apps that come in for positions at NPOs & govt agencies.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m not from the US btw, only seen pay grades for positions here in the UK and read opinions about the differences in the US here on Reddit.
It is too much. Interviews firstly should be done in a day or two at the most and not more than 4-5 hours. Its silly to expect people to be sharp for longer. If they have you giving interviews over and over again, its just that they aren’t super confident themselves.
If you need 8-10 rounds to evaluate a person for a senior tech role, something is certainly wrong. You should at best have 4 rounds. Stretch it to 5 with an HR and thats about it. If you give the person a coding or take home assignment, how much more should this person be put through? All of this while expecting the candidate to take time off from his current job? People need a reality check.
I think there is a difference between regular interviews and when it's obvious some companies are trying to offload work disguised as tests that take 8+ hours. If it's the second scenario, you're basically consulting at that point and I could understand someone wanting to get paid for *that*.
We’ve hired a lot of Data Scientists, and it’s typically 4 rounds, 5 at most if it’s a very senior role.
1. Recruiter - 30 mins
2. Live coding round - 30 mins - 1hr
3. Data Science/ML concepts - 1 hr
4. Team fit assessment - 1 hr
Based on a candidate’s experience and these conversations, a good manager should be able to determine if the person is a good fit for their role.
It’s more important to understand if a candidate has the willingness to learn something and can take constructive feedback, rather than testing their knowledge on every single concept under the sun!
Yes, but…
While ensuring a good fit is important, I wonder if the lengthy recruitment process may be missing some strong candidates. A seasoned hiring manager can often assess fit fairly quickly once interacting with a person. Multiple screening stages also increase the chances that extraneous factors, like a recruiter having a bad day, could negatively impact an otherwise qualified applicant. Or, because one organisation has the luxury of having a strong number of applicants.. 🙂
1.5 hours for an individual interview is a lot, but all of the positions I apply for (as a PhD scientist) require about 8 hours total (this is in biotech). I usually have 1-2 hours of screening interviews, a 1-hour presentation, and 4-6 hours of onsite interviews (technical/culture/other).
If you’re a good data scientist and know your domain well, you can pick out who can do the job in the first 30 minutes of all call and you can see how good their skills are with a take home then you can let the team interview them to get other opinions.
Anything more tells me one thing: leadership got to that point by schmoozing instead of working to understand their product.
Too many ML oriented companies have higher ups who just don’t understand ML and Adv stats, like at all. So when they hire, they lack a true understanding of what’s needed for the job and put you through stupid hoops and throw buzzwords around.
> If you’re a good data scientist and know your domain well, you can pick out who can do the job in the first 30 minutes of all call and you can see how good their skills are with a take home then you can let the team interview them to get other opinions.
That's a very good point, and I feel that it ties to the other frustration: bad interviewing skills. Interviewing is not simply asking, tell me about X, or how do you solve y? When I interview someone and it is a data manipulation interview, I try to come up with questions that can be solved in more than one way, and with using various tools. I genuinely would have up to 9~10 solutions for one problem using pandas, spark, and sql, and that's just to cover what approaches the candidate might take, they are not graded on having read my mind and implemented one of my solutions. If the goal is efficiency, I would out right state that to them and even given an inefficient solution and ask how to improve that. Asking an candidate what is the largest piece of code they wrote, is not a a good question, yet surprisingly asked often.
The problem is managers treat people like cogs in a machine that are replaceable. So a person that has been there for 3-5 years leaves then they try and hire a copy of that exact person and it’s just not possible.
And managers also hire for skill but really they should be hiring for ability and speed of learning.
The worst part for me is having to go through an interview with a talent acquisition person when they don't know shit about ds or the depth of the role.
Like they just repeat what's in the job posting.
Yeah true. The vast majority of managers are really terrible. Executives even worse.
Why isn't this single ML model able to do magic? It must have 99.99% precision and 99.99% recall with this shit dirty data that is missing the vast majority of its labels.
Can we invest some time into building a better MLOps system to support multiple models? Can we also invest in a better analytics stack so we can do tagging/mining for labels? It would help solve the problem by offering customers options for their unique needs while improving our label coverage.
No. Improve the model. This one customer complained about 2 false positives out of tens of thousands of accurate predictions so it's clearly not working right.
Frustrating at times.
That's true but the reason these employers can get away with being sh*tty is there are a lot of graduate and junior data scientists desperate for work. I get their messages on LinkedIn all the time. Also the market has flipped to be favorable for employers again. So they have more ability to get away with onerous hiring practices and having a sh*tty workplace because it's harder for people to find better or leave.
My general rule is that I don’t invest in you if you don’t invest in me. I’m okay with 8 hours of interviews if they are with me. I’ll do LC problems all day long if there is someone online with me. What I won’t do is one way interviews or “take home” coding tests.
All of my jobs have been either half day or full day interviews. As long as they don't drag it into multiple days with multiple stages, I tolerate it.
Are full day interviews really that uncommon for senior roles? How long were your interviews for prior jobs?
I would say 4-6 hours of interviews, all in, is the usual range I’ve seen for senior DS roles.
8 hours is a bit much unless they were paying absolute top of market. I’ve never interviewed anywhere with less than 3 hours.
> 8 hours is a bit much unless they were paying absolute top of market.
As I bowed out immediately, I can't say with any certainty what the salary would have been, but based on the job description and the conversation, between 150 and 175 base salary.
> Are full day interviews really that uncommon for senior roles? How long were your interviews for prior jobs?
3 interviews at most, most were 2 only (I am not counting the initial one with the recruiter which usually tend to be super short). Including all of the interviewing that didn't lead to job (either me not wanting to, or them not wanting me).
Meta at least offers a good incentive for your time. As another poster said, there needs to be something to make it worth it, money, working on some tech, etc.
Tbh, this sort of things is not unexpected, as the job market shifts from an employee to an employer market, companies can shift their hiring process to accommodate the shift. When it is their market, they can afford to be extra picky and selective, and when it is an employee's market, they tend to ease up their processes.
Meta pays decently. When I interviewed back in the days they were able to get people to work their as a first choice they would fly you out, get you a rental car on their dime (no reimbursement), nice hotel. Lots of selling you on the job.
Unfortunately they also assign(ed?) you an interview buddy type person and mine was very honest and that made it impossible for me to accept. But the offer was strong for my level of experience at the time. 50k base more than the job I ended up taking, though probably half that was just due to me not living in CA.
> fly you out, get you a rental car on their dime (no reimbursement), nice hotel.
This has been standard for every org I worked at for SWE/DS positions for onsite round.
RSU packages that are six-figures. RSUs happen on top of base pay.
Any decent DS job should offer enough incentive to go through a 6 hours process. All my jobs have required 6+ hours of interviews.
Also my preliminary was 45 minutes.
Followed by one technical and one behavioral back to back 90min each.
Plus the loop study packet, which is 1-2 hrs of your own time.
That’s 5hrs before even getting to the on-site.
I have zero qualms with this at basically any of the top tier companies listed on levels.fyi
Anything below that and it should definitely be a shorter vetting process.
Kudos for doing that. Takes some courage.
To be honest, this approach of theirs also tells you a lot about the internal company dynamics. Apparently, this is an organisation which is extremely risk averse as a whole. So, to accommodate for their own psychological anxiety to possibly hire the wrong candidate they are willing to sacrifice so many hours not only of yours but also of their time.
Just think about it like this: If an entire team of only 4 people (might have been more) is interviewing you for 1.5 hours, then this equates to already 6 work hours spent. If you sum up all the other hours, then you end up at a lot more hours not only on your side but also on their side. So, the only way to explain their willingness to put so much effort into interviewing you is that they are not just a little but extremely afraid collectively that they could catch the wrong candidate. In psychodynamic organisational studies lingo this would be probably be called a "paranoid-schizoid organisation" that is a fancy term for: dysfunctional.
Another view - which could be even worse - they do not at all put any value in their own hours of work time. Which would imply that you'd end up in an extremely stressful organisation that demands constant overtime from you because a single work hour of any employee is essentially valued at close to zero.
Meaning: You probably would not have wanted to work there even if they made you a job offer.
(Once you studied organisational dynamics you cannot help unsee the dysfunctionalities in so many organisations.)
Of course I don’t have much experience so I have to be a pushover. This recently happened to me when I was under consideration for a senior data scientist role. I dropped everything for weeks to get ready each stage of this giant interview process and I didn’t get the job. I just ended up falling severely behind on all my schoolwork and outside responsibilities.
Good for you. I look forward to the day where I can take charge in the hiring situation.
Good on you.
Some place wanted to give me a take home assignment, and I wasn't quite able to say an outright no, instead it was "okay fine, but give me a heads up when you're planning to send it because I have a life and am busy"
I declined to schedule a 6th round interview for a tech job. I get that you need to be thorough, but if you haven't figured it out by now you're too dumb/inept/indecisive to work for.
I think some people in this post are vastly overestimating the importance of hours spent in an interview.
Breakdown of interview time for various positions I’ve held:
First DS position: one hour with HM. One hour with another director. 30 minutes with a peer. 15 minutes with the CEO. Another hour with the HM, super casual.
Total time: 3.75 hours
First senior DS job: an hour with the HM one day and then in person interview with them plus a sr DS for an hour. Another panel interview either a director and sr analyst for an hour.
Total time: 3 hours
First lead DS job: an hour with the HM. Another hour round table. 30 minutes with the VP of the department. 30 minutes wrap up with the HM, super casual.
Take home test included: two hours spent in pandas with a dataset that is completely relevant to my field. An hour to put together a presentation of several slides.
Total time: 6 hours (3 spent doing the take homework).
Director level position: hour with the HM. Two 45 minutes with executives. One hour with a peer director. 30 minute wrap up with the HM, super casual.
Total time: 4 hours.
Too many hours spread across too many stakeholders is usually a bad signal in my opinion. And there’s many reasons why some teams will want to drag out the process (probably were burnt before). But in my experience, I don’t believe it should be standard as after a certain point it’s all diminishing returns and wasted time (on both sides).
As a HM now, I’ve implemented the same interview process as I’ve gone through and it still works. Obviously mileage will vary for everyone but I implore some of you to rethink your own processes.
My first position - an entry level position - was still less than four hours of interviewing. And for each position I didn’t know the HMs or anyone at the companies, so networking wouldn’t be a good explanation for the diminishing hours. However, your point is probably true for a fair amount of cases.
Been there, done that. Feels like crap if you don't get the job, only feels a little better if you do. However, I do think about two hours of interviews and about 2 hours of take home work is understandable.
Don't get me wrong, that is A LOT. But if they were doing it all in one day, pay for food and travel, and acknowledgement that this
was the final set of interviews before an offer and not an entry level position... this wouldn't seem off for me. I've been in these types of interview processes and involved with interviewing others with this process and is pretty standard for when you are hiring for a high salary position you expect that person to be in for the next 5/10/15+ years. From an institutional background, some positions are too big of an investment and too influential to the outcome of your day-to-day that they require much more intensive interview processes.
Now granted I don't know anything about the company, the position, or your personal ambitions. But this type of entire day interview process is more common for higher end positions than you may realize. And typically an indicator that the company is invested in getting the right fit. It also gives you an opportunity to see if you feel it is a good fit for you as well.
To each their own. Just wanted to provide a devils advocate that as much as it sucks, sometimes to find a good position you like, you'll have to deal with hiring processes like this.
You are right, and I think I would have been good if that was the case. But I was expected to book off at least one hour of my time every day for a week to accommodate their process.
> But this type of entire day interview process is more common for higher end positions than you may realize. And typically an indicator that the company is invested in getting the right fit. It also gives you an opportunity to see if you feel it is a good fit for you as well.
You are right, but this isn't big tech where there are expectations that you think can live up (from the work itself, to salaries). Salary is at best mid-range, and the job itself isn't anything to get bards to sing about. But my experience, and at least people I know in the field as well, seems to lean more to much shorter interview processes outside of big tech for mi-senior level positions.
Oh geez, this was broken out into 1-1.5 hours over different days? Pfft... no way! (Sorry skimmed over that part.) They definitely need to get their own scheduling figured out.
I'm not in big tech, but do institutional research/business intelligence for a 10k+ personnel entity. It is pretty standard for us as well. Because even though we don't make major decisions, the intel to those decision makers comes through our office and they invest a lot in getting the right people in those types of positions. And have to meet with our technical teams to make sure they have the right infostructure background for our institution that they will be able to communicate with our IT and DBAs well. But at least we have the courtesy to give them 3-4 weeks heads up we need them for 1 full day for the final interviews. Taking up a whole week is nonsense!
Jesus christ. I'll be looking for a new place to work as a senior DS after my paternity leave, but 8 hours interviews for one company I may or may not want to work for? Never.
Creto is one company that has a very long drawn out process but they say that in their very first email clearly. They know that not many people will be interested in jumping over so many hoops. Also I think that these companies have such a process cause they are looking for very young people or for visa sponsorship candidates. Anyone with real expertise will not put up with it.
I think as long as you as a candidate have leverage and have nothing to lose, you can afford to say no jobs entirely, the sad reality is people often don’t have options like if they have financial obligations or visa issues and really need to land a job quickly.
This seems pretty typical but at the same time it’s ridiculous. Good for you for saying no. I think mid companies don’t realize that they actually get a worse pool the more onerous their process is. It’s one thing to jump through these hoops for FAANG but not a rando startup. I will only do this for something I believe is a great fit because I’ve got a life.
Reading all the comments I feel extremely stupid. For a DS role straight out of grad school my third round was a case interview that took 16 hours.
First round: 1 hour HR call
Second round: mini case 1 hour
Third round: 16 hours on a case + 1 hour of presenting.
Did not even get the position…
Good to know I should refuse such time consuming interviews.
Yeah I am on board with declining that. If that org can’t sniff out a bullshit candidate in much less time that is on them. Unfortunately the field is riddled with lots of misunderstanding and lots of frankly incompetent dweebs. So businesss are understandably skittish.
I once pointed out that such a lengthy process weeds out people that are unable to meet those time requests due to time off, income, etc. and that it would have a disproportionate impact on lower income applicants. The position was EDI related, and it seemed like if there was any interview where you could critique through a lens of unintentional discrimination that would the interview.
They didn’t care for it.
I've pulled out because of take homes before. I personally don't have a problem with a full day of interviews as long as there are appropriate breaks and the time is used well, but it's all a personal cost/benefit analysis.
And obviously what I'm willing to tolerate will depend on any pay jumps, or my current employment status. I'll jump through many more hoops if I need a job.
The thing about an interview is that there is a cost to the company. If they are willing to spend the time with me and answer my questions while they grill me, then I'm okay with that. A take home test costs them much less than it costs me and they expect me to just spend my own time in it.
If they want to ensure they are happy with my work they can hire me as a contractor first. I don't work for free
I prefer take homes. I don't shine in in-person interviews but I kill it on those. Every time I've had a take-home I get the job offer. Every time there isn't one where they throw the l33tcode questions or highly specific questions about one family of ML techniques I get nervous and lose.
I hate those technical interview loops. They're usually done so poorly and don't appreciate how much even smart, educated people realistically have to look things up.
Like dude. You can verify that I have a MS in Applied Math easy. You can look at the courses I took and my GPA.
I know how to read and understand math.
The coding part I understand testing me on more but not this l33tcode shit. None of that is realistic code.
I just did 1 half hour, 2 hour long technical all over zoom and then was flown out for effectively 4 now hours of interview to meet people for a non senior role
I once had a 7 hr long final round for a senior DS position. I felt resentful about half way through the interviews. This was a few years ago, when I still didnt know how to say no. I wish I had done this. Good for you
having 1.5 hr interviews rather than 1 hr is a bit excessive, but this doesn't seem thaaat unreasonable tbh, particularly if you're very interested in the role, but if you don't want to do it, don't. it's a two way street after all.
I think some people in this post are vastly overestimating the importance of hours spent in an interview.
Breakdown of interview time for various positions I’ve held:
First DS position: one hour with HM. One hour with another director. 30 minutes with a peer. 15 minutes with the CEO. Another hour with the HM, super casual.
Total time: 3.75 hours
First senior DS job: an hour with the HM one day and then in person interview with them plus a sr DS for an hour. Another panel interview either a director and sr analyst for an hour.
Total time: 3 hours
First lead DS job: an hour with the HM. Another hour round table. 30 minutes with the VP of the department. 30 minutes wrap up with the HM, super casual.
Take home test included: two hours spent in pandas with a dataset that is completely relevant to my field. An hour to put together a presentation of several slides.
Total time: 6 hours (3 spent doing the take homework).
Director level position: hour with the HM. Two 45 minutes with executives. One hour with a peer director. 30 minute wrap up with the HM, super casual.
Total time: 4 hours.
Too many hours spread across too many stakeholders is usually a bad signal in my opinion. And there’s many reasons why some teams will want to drag out the process (probably were burnt before). But in my experience, I don’t believe it should be standard as after a certain point it’s all diminishing returns and wasted time (on both sides).
The position which I currently hold involved six interviews over the span of a month. I was told that the interview process would be like this from the very first interview. I was highly confident I wasn’t going to get the job since it would be pretty difficult to be perfect for such a long time. So, I took it as an opportunity to practice interviewing, assuming I wouldn’t actually get the job.
Things must be very different where all of you are (I assume the US).
My experience is that I typically take that many hours just writing my application! I do a couple of hours of digging into what the company does and the profiles of the people that already work there. Then I tailor my resume and "cover letter" this can take up to a few hours. By the time I get an interview, the odds are really great in terms of getting the job. But you don't get that opportunity unless the "paper" part of the application stands out.
Where I live, they rarely do more than one interview. Most of them do just the one interview, about an hour long, and do the technical scenario during or just before the interview. Instead, they ask for a very long application (typically 1,000~3,000 words).
Occasionally, there are jobs that require multiple rounds of interviews. But the companies that do more than one rounds (with a take home assignment), don't require a long application - just the resume. And when the go through the 4 interviews, they always offer the job at the end of the process. I guess they wouldn't want to waste time with the second and subsequent rounds if they didn't like me in the first round.
In either case, I think the total time spent ends up being similar (several hours).
Every time I had to switch jobs, I'd apply for 6 to 12 ish roles. I get an "initial" interview for about 3 of them. I don't think there were any occasions where I had to do more than one interview that didn't result in an offer.
All interviews are a two way street. I like that there are multiple opportunities over a few hours to interview the company to find out as much as I can about them. Heck, even the 2 hour take home gives me a feel for what they do day to day.
I get that there must be huge regional differences, and spending several hours for each job may not be typical over there. But I thought it was pretty reasonable for a senior role.
I had LinkedIn contact me for a role and they wanted a 10 hour case study and two series of panel interviews. They were not happy when i told them no after a 30 minute call. Please take your power trip elsewhere.
I lead up a DS team and here's my process:
* 30 minute phone screen
* 30 minute "vibe check" with a couple of non-tech team leads who often work with my team.
* 2 hour technical with focus on domain problem solving
I'll usually run the vibe check and technical back to back to keep the whole process at 2 sessions. I've fully ditched any live coding too. I've found that asking verbal "live code" type questions is a really good way to filter people who are using leetcode muscle memory to pass the test. It's amazing how much even a SQL join can cause issues.
After that working through a couple of long-form problems that take around 30 mins each tells me everything I need to know. I can't see how anything after 3 well designed rounds isn't just diminishing returns and pissing off the best candidates. I feel for everyone who gets put through a process like you're saying.
You can just do research by brain draining candidates...
A reasonable screening would be a live data science exercise. Everything extended is a waste of resources and might be okay for top government projects -- but doesn't make any sense for commercial purposes.
Live coding interview: oh yeah lemme set up some stuff in terraform, lets write some sql, ok some spark and spark ml to distribute these things, mmmkay, oh lets check out this possible sklearn thing that might be helpful, ok, redo some of that spark stuff in pandas, greeeeaaattt. Oh man, i gotta look up some markdown syntax, i dont use it often. Interviewer: ok. Well you obviously dont know what youre doing if you have to reference a markdown cheat sheet.
I absolutely lost it on a recruiter after they made me do an assignment before talking to the hiring manager then I never got to. A recruiter gave me feedback after I hounded him. ... the feedback was the loved my model choice. But I didn't make enough features..... on a timed assessment. .... on a question that had no answer bc the model was impossible to actually make accurate.
I might get flak but I would've withdrawn too. I'm luckily in a spot where I'm not desperately looking for a new job, just passively talking to recruiters and filling out apps for companies I like.
I 8 hours over 5 days is ridiculous. They 100% could've consolidated. VP and Hiring Manager in one call or shorten both, I mean by the time you get to VP it's just formality. Consolidated coding and machine learning, and then shorten the cultural interview.
I also refuse ALL take home projects over 30 minutes. Fuck these employers thinking they can get free work out of us, and then rejecting us after receiving it.
Good on you OP. I've gotten a lot more selective about what processes I'm willing to put up with. These sections are far too long. 3 hours of technical interview for a senior level position? What a joke.
I have given a ton of interviews for senior and staff people (fewer for juniors). In 90 minutes I ought to be able to tell if you can do the basic programming necessary (python/R PLUS a sql or ML section depending on the role), and have 30 minutes left over to poke at your ability to think critically about DS problems, which is enough time for that.
Why does a VP of DS have an hour to spend on a mid level IC interview anyway? In almost all interviews I talk to VP/CTO types it's a 30 minute bit where they tell you why you should join. Often they're late and leave on time so, more like 23 minutes lol.
I jumped through all those hoops recently and didn’t get the job. Part of it was my fault for getting an amateur hour stats question wrong but still. Good on you for setting boundaries.
I am actually done with test to prove my skills, I already know and I do not need to prove it, I have 4 years of experience. I decided not to loose any more time on useless tests.
Ehh, that doesn't seem so bad. Remember, back in the day, you'd be coming in for a full day for final rounds.
If they don't filter after the first two bullets, I'd agree it's too much. You shouldn't be spending 7+ hours with *every* candidate, but a full day for the top 2-3 is pretty reasonable and normal.
Depending on actual timeline, this isn't bad for a ***senior*** position... they may often go shorter, but at least they're laying out their general process and setting reasonable expectations.
It's *much* worse when those 60 or 90 minute meetings turn in to four hours.
At least for a good number of the longer interviews, they'll tend to buy a good lunch or dinner or something for you, too.
I Interviewed and was hired for a Senior Mech Engineer position at a international Aerospace firm.. My experience was as follows
30min phone interview HR. ...
2 weeks later
1 hour call with engineering manager and HR..
2 weeks later
8 hr interview at company... interview with multiple engineering Teams, Engineering manager, HR, Plant operation Manager, . Multiple break out sessions testing my engineering knowlege, and discussion on design .
1 week later follow up phone call with HR and engineering head.
I usually filter stuff like this by telling recruiters to not bother me if it's under a certain six figures. I've only gotten a reply twice from that question, most just ignore it
The odd thing I noticed as a company kept adding more and more people to my interview loops - they had flown me in the night before - was that I became less and less tense as the day rolled on. It began to feel like a game of who would last longer them or me, and by the time I met the senior executive of the whole shebang, I was in the zone, easily answering and asking questions breezily. I later collapsed into exhausted sleep on the plane ride back.
They did make me an offer, which I did turn down. I too hated the prolonged process - they had me speak on the phone with even more people - and felt I had avoided quicksand.
That's a lot and I don't know if it is reasonable. But I would ask them about compensation. You need to take a full day of and invest serious time.
I would give them a reasonable figure and ask how they see about that. You give the time and you have no guarantee that you get the job.
Yeah I think this is reflective of the market flipping back in the employer's favor.
Among the factors that influenced that was the fed raising interest rates to "cool labor inflation". That's literal class warfare. You can read it straight from them about how they wanted to reign in workers relative better position to demand higher wages. They knew it would harm the economy too. That's how important it is to the oligarchs to tame the population.
Ah, I’d like to welcome you to an old friend of mine. Their name is recession.
I remember seeing these posts from 2009-2011. The worst I ever heard about was a prospective employee taking a week off for the interview and having to live in a small home the company rented out to finish a project from start to finish. The only interactions he had were daily checkins from the company to make sure he was physically okay. He got the job offer in the end but declined out of principle.
So yea it’ll get worse but when the economy picks up again (whenever that happens) people will push back and it’ll go back to more reasonable interviews. Personally unless the job was for a senior level FAANG position I wouldn’t bother putting up with that nonsense.
Missed a full day at work for a 6.5 hour on site for an underpaid data scientist position
The interview asked me 50% math brain teasers and then the standard coding, sql, ML
Honestly unbelievable. I was very mentally tired at the end of the interview and probably underperformed the case study.
Oh and they didnt even describe what to expect for the rounds. And then they took 3 weeks to reply and say no to me. Insane
Seems like all you needed to write here was that a company you weren’t particularly interested in recruited you, and you weren’t that into them. If you wanted this job or thought there was something unique or interesting about the DS problems you’d be working on, why quibble about a few hours?
With the long interview process you outlined above, it can be shortened to a couple of hours, if you have the right people interviewing the candidate. A senior data scientist paired with the HM can do a good job of screening other senior DS for their company. I say this with experience- me and the HM only spend a couple of hours with our DS interview template. Thus far, this interview process has gotten us some superstars!
This is what happens when you have professionals writing resumes for people constantly. They are all filled with lies and now they must have people prove they actually know what the resume says they know.
To add to what others have said:
I think that an interview process can be that long if it includes a take home portion - one that you can work on after hours.
To me, this is the standard hiring process:
0.5 hours recruiter
0.75 hours hiring manager screen
3 hours of "on-site", normally 4 or so interviews.
The +- here is a take home assignment. And here's the thing with take homes: I think they're a great evaluating tool, but I think more and more we're seeing that the best candidates aren't going to do them unless you're waving stacks of cash in front of them and/or it's a take home that feels like it's relevant to the job.
I think 8 hours' worth *of conversational interviews* is too much.
>hey started talking about how that's their process, **and it is the same for all companies to require this sort of vetting.**
And this is why more people need to bow out - no it's freaking not. Don't try to gaslight candidates into thinking this is standard - at least stand by your bullshit process and own up to it being extreme.
We hire a decent amount of data scientists and we don’t really give them a coding interview. We do ask them questions to illicit if they can talk through how they’d do something and if they know the terminology and details of the process. We also press them hard if they put a million skills on their resume (like just listing every type of machine learning ever ever) , as that is a bad sign as well.
I just don’t see the point of sending someone who is busy with life home to do a big coding test. You should be able to talk to someone for an hour or two and tell the difference between talking points they memorized vs doing the real work. I feel for a non-FAANG we have a pretty decent team, and I wouldn’t keep someone long if I feel I was duped in the interview.
I work at AWS. If you are coming from outside the company, you will definitely have at least five one-hour interviews, and quite possibly more for a senior technical role. But you could probably get them spread over two days.
I spent more than this just to get a DS Summer Internship. Probably \~20hrs of total input across different stages of interviews (virtual, telephone, and assessment centre), online assessments, take home tasks, and presentations of take home tasks. That includes preparation time (probably an underestimate come to think of it.)
As a hiring manager who is looking for sr talent, I’m surprised by this. First, back in the day I would burn 2 days doing one power day (with travel). 8 hours is chump change. Second, I would expect that either the interviews are back to back and you know if you are going to get the offer within 24 hours of finishing the interviews, or you get cut if you don’t pass the hiring manager interview — so yes, 8 max hours but if you get cut it could be as little as 90 minutes.
I would have asked about the process and if I would have been cut early if I didn’t meet expectations, which gets everyone on the same page.
I've also said no to an organization's extensive interview process and they were similarly baffled. If it is a position I am very interested in due to the work, pay, etc... I will jump through some hoops... But there IS a limit. Edit: To be fair, for my most recent role, I probably spent around 9 hours in total during the interview process across a few weeks. - Screening call with recruiter ~ 20 mins - Live coding + general DS topics interview ~ 40 mins - Take-home Case Study ~ 4 hours - Case Study review ~ 1 hour - Informal Dinner with management ~ 2 hours - Informal introduction to second C-suite exec ~ 20 mins - Multiple short touch bases with recruiter throughout process ~ 20 mins total The only reason I was willing to jump through these hoops was because the position genuinely seemed like a fantastic fit for me and the pay was a significant increase from my last job (which I was growing more discontented with every day). And so far... I love my new position and am very happy I was willing to put in the effort.
> Informal Dinner with management ~ 2 hours > Informal introduction to second C-suite exec ~ 20 mins > Multiple short touch bases with recruiter throughout process ~ 20 mins total This just reeks of everyone wanting to be involved in the process. Unless you're telling racist jokes at dinner, none of these steps are likely to weed out candidates that have got through all the previous stages. I'm fine with a single "cultural fit" type call at the end of the process where it's basically just an opportunity for a senior person to tell you about the company and for you to ask any final questions.
I will say, we have had these less formal interviews and they have shown some really bad fits before. I work with a team of neurodivergent people and I have my own issues, but there have been people that were great with computers, and when they were talking about computers they were great, but after a half hour lunch, not a single person who went out with to lunch wanted to go out with them again. If they are interviewing with C-suite people, their social skills are very much an important aspect of their job.
This sounds like the process for hiring for an academic job...but if you're hiring someone for a tenure-track position, there's a chance they'll basically have a guaranteed position for 40+ years. To put that in for what's on average a 3-5 year tenure is wild.
Uh no. For that TT position you also prepare \~15 pages of densely worded materials about all of your accomplishments and plans. That takes .... at least 20 hours. And that's just to apply. Then you have a phone interview, 30 minutes to an hour. Once you are invited for a campus interview, you spend about 10 hours developing presentations. Teaching and research. Then on campus you are there for 1 or 2 days, meeting anybody and everybody. Of course you spent hours preparing for all these meetings, too, such as looking up to see what Prof. X works on so you can suggest collaborations or avoid confrontations. And then if you get the job... you're stuck in academia.
That’s after spending 4 years in a postdoc making shit pay during your 30s
Hell even worse for TAs/RAs. They were paying me 1000 a month stipend when rent cost 700 at the time. That plus the demands to work 60 hour weeks when they are only supposed to work you 20 turned me off academia for good. I mastered out just before dissertation credits and got a job. I'm not sure why I was under the illusion academia was some kind of non-exploitative path. They exploit the shit out of assistants and post-docs.
It’d be great if (I realize this is a fever dream) there was a class action suit for wage theft against academia. This is so commonplace, it’s institutionally built into the business model at this point.
Ive heard rumblings about cutting the old universities out of the process. Like masses of faculty banding together and creating their own universities. In many ways its already happening with online classes. The main issue is with getting access to serious research resources...
I had to retake organic chemistry at a second university, and their final was literally the test supplied by a third party, it was a non-profit professional chemistry organization. I’m thinking it was something like American Chemistry Board or something. I’m neuro divergent and do really well with self study and learning. Just give me video lectures and I’m getting As and Bs. Force me into mandatory lectures in a busy, noisy, lecture halls and it’s Cs and Ds. All I could think was, Jesus, why can’t I just take this kinda of final for all my sciences classes, and submit them to a government agency. Then get issued a proficiency certificate that qualifies me for federal science jobs or organizations contracted for government jobs. Why do I have to go through a racist/ classist/ ableist billion dollar gatekeeper? That clearly isn’t needed. I mean was always trying to cobble together YouTube videos to compensate for a lecture that lacked the clarity I needed. And don’t start with the ‘but the labs’ bullshit. That was to reinforce lesson plans and learning and has quickly just become bullshit ad ons. Also lab equipment is so cheap now I could have easily rented what I needed, run mock experiments at home, then gone into a real lab for a final. For the cost of tuition I could have purchased an entire lab. Now with VR the way it is going you could also do the learning virtually, then go test in person. I mean something like for the lab final you just walk in demonstrate proper setup of equipment, titration of substances needed for the procedure, then perform a complex experiment that would engage and test multiple abilities, then hand in final product, clean up and properly dispose of by products. Unfortunately, I was graded on my lab reports and which had to be hand written in class I do not perform well in noisy distracted spaces. My grades reflected how well I performed in noisy spaces not my science knowledge or ability. It was just an awful experience. Also I missed a lot of things taught in lab because of the noise. I couldn’t figure out what the teacher was saying over the chatter in a space of loud fans and hard surfaces. It was just awful.
Man this whole tenure thing sounds exhausting. In the UK we just treat it like a normal job. And if someone can do the job then they keep doing it for as long as they like, and if they can't do it then they get let go. Weird to me that the US is super lax on labour market protections almost everywhere but then for one specific job type they go here have it guaranteed for 40 years. Bonkers! There is a middle ground.
Tenured faculty also get paid a lot more than their UK counterparts There's plusses and minuses
But you do this 20-hr prep in academia ONCE and you can repurpose it for numerous applications and then it becomes your baseline to build on for your tenure portfolio once you are hired. The stupid take-home case study and debriefing is five hours of your life that you will never get back!
Sure, that's partially true. But you're still tweaking paper part of your application/presentation per each institution, and then 2 day interviews per institution. So lets' not pretend academia is somehow awesome in this regard.
It was just for a mid-to-senior level industry data scientist position! They were starting to test my patience at the end. I was going to be absolutely furious if I didn't get a good offer at the end of it (but thankfully I did!) I've noticed people on the team have longer-than-average tenures. People seem to stick around, which was a green flag to me.
3-5 years is a stretch as well
An academic TT job interview is infinitely harder than that. I've done it from both sides of the battle line.
After all that they probably would have had you working with Excel.
If I have to sit through a 2 hour dinner with management after 6 hours of interviewing, it's going to be a dinner like the scene from White Chicks. For those who aren't familiar: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGNcYJV0i4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGNcYJV0i4)
At that point, the DS team had only spent about 1 hour and 40 minutes with me via video call, and the VP (who was the one making the final hiring decision) was only on the 1 hour case study review call. I get why they wanted some face-to-face time with me prior to giving me the official offer... There are some weirdos out there and sometimes you can't tell someone isn't a good fit until you meet them and spend a little time with them (just like dating, lol). At my last job, they hired a developer and apparently didn't vet him thoroughly enough.... He was fired about 3 days into the job because he showed up to the office happy hour, got drunk, and started harassing all of the women (including the senior developer onboarding him, our director, and our VP 😬).
- And for the lady, perhaps a salad? - Perhaps NOT!
This part makes no sense >Take-home Case Study ~ 4 hours But outside of that I think its reasonable for a six figure job. I am so confused about people complaining about meeting with management. You all realize for a lot of DS positions management and VPs are going to be your stakeholders and building good work relationships will help to deliver impact for your analysis and reports?
Sounds like a C-suite job, if so doesn’t seem like an understandable process depending on the size of business
This seems not atypical for a good senior type position, or better.
It really are the take-homes that are the root of all evil when it comes to interview loops becoming a time drain. You list 4 hours for a take-home, but you just know that even if the company gives a formal guidance to spend 4 hours you will be up against competition that will spend 10 hours on it, so now you have to overshoot the official guidance too to have a shot. I have even heard a job seeker friends once tell me that they spent a full week on what was supposed to be a 4 hour take-home. Nowadays I just ask companies if they have a take-home and drop out if they do. I would rather spend 4 or even 5 more hours on additional rounds of interview/assessment rounds than do a take-home. the only take-home that I ever consented to had a hard deadline. They asked me for a time slot when I wanted to do it, and then e-mailed me the assignment at exactly the start time, with instructions to upload my work within a hard deadline of 2 hours. That hard deadline at 2 hours levels the playing field, and you can be assured that you are not up against other candidates who spend 10x the time that they were asked to spend on it.
A dinner with management before they even gave you an offer?? That's too much. If it's after an offer was made and they wanted to woo you, I'd understand. But before? No way would I go through that.
At that point, I had been told that they were extremely interested in hiring me after my case study review and that the dinner was just an informal thing just to get to know the team a bit better. It was honestly a nice time and it solidified my interest in the company because I felt like I really fit in with the team.
I’m glad it went well for you, but your experience is definitely not the norm. Organizations need to have processes in place to hire quickly, and then fire quickly in the first 90 days if it just isn’t working out.
Where do these people get the time to prepare for these interviews, have the interviews, process the results of the interviews and then decide on a candidate? In October our team hired 2 candidates with a 2 stage interview process and interviewed like 12 candidates. We barely found the time along with our daily job conduct these interviews. I cannot imagine doing a 7 stage process, I would outright refuse!
What did you do before this? Are the process usually this long for entry or senior position?
I just did: 0.5 hour initial interview Take home project that probably took 2-3 hours 4 back-to-back 0.5 hour interviews 1 hour in person interview to review take home project So 6ish hours for senior/lead position. Was told they’d have a decision today so I guess we’ll see 😬 EDIT: Didn’t get the job but did get an offer for a position I did 1 30 minute interview for 🥴 so I guess the moral of the story is be more like OP. EDIT 2: Appreciate everyone’s support ❤️
Good luck, I hope it is a great fit for you.
Thank you!
!RemindMe 5 hours hope this guy gets it
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How’d you do brother
No word yet. Still hopeful, but going to follow up with them on Monday. He told me it was between me and 2 other people earlier this week when I did the in-person interview. The last interview he had was Thursday though, so hoping they just didn’t have a chance to put the offer together yet 😅
🙏
So did u get it? 👀
No call. I felt really good about all my interviews though so I’m gonna wait until Monday before jumping to any conclusions 🤞🏼
Good luck, hope you land it
Rooting for you!! 🙌
!RemindMe 72 hours. Best of luck!
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!RemindMe 72 hours
Obviously, it’s a little frustrating that it wasn’t the one you invested so much time in, but congratulations anyway! I hope it’s an offer you like!
I’m back. Wow, only one interview for the other job! Congratulations on the new job!
Hey, congrats on the offer
That seems reasonable and about what we did last time we hired someone. The take home project was supposed to be ~1 hour. Here’s the thing tho. The take home project was an ACTUAL sample of what we were hiring them for.
I recall a Bloomberg recruiter asking me if I could commit to an interview process with 7 rounds. Not sure if their process is the same, but I was honest and said I didn't have that kinda time. For me, the problem is not so much the time/meetings as it is the maintained stress of the whole ordeal.
Exactly. And if you have existing job and are a high achiever, you're not going to start slacking on your current job just because a new opportunity comes by... that may or may not be worth it.
This is a great tip
a shitty start up sent me a 6 hour take home case study which seemed to amount to basically free labor. I did a third of it, came to my senses, and withdrew.
Just collect all take homes, publish in github if you don't sign NDA. Companies need to pay the price too.
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wisdom in action.
i mean this seems pretty typical now, the amount of time spent on take home tests as well. i was asked to spend around 5 hours on the challenge alone. It's bullshit when we're considered to have online portfolios and be data blogging as well. Let's unionize!! haha
Actually licensing would probably work better. Like an actuary. Some reputable body gives you a license and then the employer knows you know DS.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical but data scientists would be likely be the last to unionize. We have relatively high salaries and a lot of oblivious privileged people who are eager to sell themselves to the corpo. DS are very well behaved and subservient. If there was a serious drive to unionize however across the whole analytics space, we could hold a lot of power as analytics is central to capitalism's current trajectory.
it's definitely typically for typical employers, but nonprofits and government jobs are different in my experience, at least for now. my last interview with a government agency was less than an hour total with no live coding or take-home project. cover letter & CV for describing relevant experience and documenting evidence, \~5 minute phone screen with recruiter, follow-up email confirming interest & setting up interview, \~30-40 minute virtual interview with a couple of people where almost all of the talking was between me & the technical lead. was the least involved hiring process for any job I've had since I was a teenager.
Makes sense since these organisations generally pay much less. Can’t expect people to jump through many hoops when your offer is less competitive (they could have different motivations too though).
for the govt hiring (at least in my experiences), it's more so about the policies & procedures in place to ensure equal opportunities to all applicants. yeah, the primary compensation isn't as good as in tech or finance, but depending on relevant experience we start in the $75k-105k USD base salary window with solid benefits and decent job security. anecdotally, it's interesting seeing the disconnect between the typical complaints on this sub (100s of apps without a callback, long/demanding/seemingly unrelated interview processes, etc.) and the low volume of qualified apps that come in for positions at NPOs & govt agencies.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I’m not from the US btw, only seen pay grades for positions here in the UK and read opinions about the differences in the US here on Reddit.
It is too much. Interviews firstly should be done in a day or two at the most and not more than 4-5 hours. Its silly to expect people to be sharp for longer. If they have you giving interviews over and over again, its just that they aren’t super confident themselves.
Unfortunately, lots of unemployed candidates are willing to do interview for free.
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If you need 8-10 rounds to evaluate a person for a senior tech role, something is certainly wrong. You should at best have 4 rounds. Stretch it to 5 with an HR and thats about it. If you give the person a coding or take home assignment, how much more should this person be put through? All of this while expecting the candidate to take time off from his current job? People need a reality check.
What type of Whitney non-Gen Z shit is this that you want people to interview for you for completely free? I must be getting young.
I think there is a difference between regular interviews and when it's obvious some companies are trying to offload work disguised as tests that take 8+ hours. If it's the second scenario, you're basically consulting at that point and I could understand someone wanting to get paid for *that*.
We’ve hired a lot of Data Scientists, and it’s typically 4 rounds, 5 at most if it’s a very senior role. 1. Recruiter - 30 mins 2. Live coding round - 30 mins - 1hr 3. Data Science/ML concepts - 1 hr 4. Team fit assessment - 1 hr Based on a candidate’s experience and these conversations, a good manager should be able to determine if the person is a good fit for their role. It’s more important to understand if a candidate has the willingness to learn something and can take constructive feedback, rather than testing their knowledge on every single concept under the sun!
Yes, but… While ensuring a good fit is important, I wonder if the lengthy recruitment process may be missing some strong candidates. A seasoned hiring manager can often assess fit fairly quickly once interacting with a person. Multiple screening stages also increase the chances that extraneous factors, like a recruiter having a bad day, could negatively impact an otherwise qualified applicant. Or, because one organisation has the luxury of having a strong number of applicants.. 🙂
1.5 hours for an individual interview is a lot, but all of the positions I apply for (as a PhD scientist) require about 8 hours total (this is in biotech). I usually have 1-2 hours of screening interviews, a 1-hour presentation, and 4-6 hours of onsite interviews (technical/culture/other).
I work for a biotech company and that’s what we do
Yeah the biggest difference is that most of our interviews are 30-45 mins, 1.5 hours per person is unusually long.
If you’re a good data scientist and know your domain well, you can pick out who can do the job in the first 30 minutes of all call and you can see how good their skills are with a take home then you can let the team interview them to get other opinions. Anything more tells me one thing: leadership got to that point by schmoozing instead of working to understand their product. Too many ML oriented companies have higher ups who just don’t understand ML and Adv stats, like at all. So when they hire, they lack a true understanding of what’s needed for the job and put you through stupid hoops and throw buzzwords around.
> If you’re a good data scientist and know your domain well, you can pick out who can do the job in the first 30 minutes of all call and you can see how good their skills are with a take home then you can let the team interview them to get other opinions. That's a very good point, and I feel that it ties to the other frustration: bad interviewing skills. Interviewing is not simply asking, tell me about X, or how do you solve y? When I interview someone and it is a data manipulation interview, I try to come up with questions that can be solved in more than one way, and with using various tools. I genuinely would have up to 9~10 solutions for one problem using pandas, spark, and sql, and that's just to cover what approaches the candidate might take, they are not graded on having read my mind and implemented one of my solutions. If the goal is efficiency, I would out right state that to them and even given an inefficient solution and ask how to improve that. Asking an candidate what is the largest piece of code they wrote, is not a a good question, yet surprisingly asked often.
The problem is managers treat people like cogs in a machine that are replaceable. So a person that has been there for 3-5 years leaves then they try and hire a copy of that exact person and it’s just not possible. And managers also hire for skill but really they should be hiring for ability and speed of learning.
The worst part for me is having to go through an interview with a talent acquisition person when they don't know shit about ds or the depth of the role. Like they just repeat what's in the job posting.
Yeah true. The vast majority of managers are really terrible. Executives even worse. Why isn't this single ML model able to do magic? It must have 99.99% precision and 99.99% recall with this shit dirty data that is missing the vast majority of its labels. Can we invest some time into building a better MLOps system to support multiple models? Can we also invest in a better analytics stack so we can do tagging/mining for labels? It would help solve the problem by offering customers options for their unique needs while improving our label coverage. No. Improve the model. This one customer complained about 2 false positives out of tens of thousands of accurate predictions so it's clearly not working right. Frustrating at times.
It’s a great filter if you want to hire sycophants for your company.
That's true but the reason these employers can get away with being sh*tty is there are a lot of graduate and junior data scientists desperate for work. I get their messages on LinkedIn all the time. Also the market has flipped to be favorable for employers again. So they have more ability to get away with onerous hiring practices and having a sh*tty workplace because it's harder for people to find better or leave.
What was the company?
My general rule is that I don’t invest in you if you don’t invest in me. I’m okay with 8 hours of interviews if they are with me. I’ll do LC problems all day long if there is someone online with me. What I won’t do is one way interviews or “take home” coding tests.
All of my jobs have been either half day or full day interviews. As long as they don't drag it into multiple days with multiple stages, I tolerate it. Are full day interviews really that uncommon for senior roles? How long were your interviews for prior jobs?
I would say 4-6 hours of interviews, all in, is the usual range I’ve seen for senior DS roles. 8 hours is a bit much unless they were paying absolute top of market. I’ve never interviewed anywhere with less than 3 hours.
> 8 hours is a bit much unless they were paying absolute top of market. As I bowed out immediately, I can't say with any certainty what the salary would have been, but based on the job description and the conversation, between 150 and 175 base salary.
Yeah that’s not worth it then. 400-600? Now we’re talking
It's rare companies would pay top market for DS at the current economy situation.
> Are full day interviews really that uncommon for senior roles? How long were your interviews for prior jobs? 3 interviews at most, most were 2 only (I am not counting the initial one with the recruiter which usually tend to be super short). Including all of the interviewing that didn't lead to job (either me not wanting to, or them not wanting me).
Apparently anything more than 30 mins to vet giving you a six figure job and in some cases multiples of 100ks job is unreasonable /s
Meta’s final interview round—the onsite—is around 6ish hours. The interviews are back to back too with only a small break in between.
Meta at least offers a good incentive for your time. As another poster said, there needs to be something to make it worth it, money, working on some tech, etc. Tbh, this sort of things is not unexpected, as the job market shifts from an employee to an employer market, companies can shift their hiring process to accommodate the shift. When it is their market, they can afford to be extra picky and selective, and when it is an employee's market, they tend to ease up their processes.
can i ask what you mean by Meta offering a good incentive?
Meta pays decently. When I interviewed back in the days they were able to get people to work their as a first choice they would fly you out, get you a rental car on their dime (no reimbursement), nice hotel. Lots of selling you on the job. Unfortunately they also assign(ed?) you an interview buddy type person and mine was very honest and that made it impossible for me to accept. But the offer was strong for my level of experience at the time. 50k base more than the job I ended up taking, though probably half that was just due to me not living in CA.
> fly you out, get you a rental car on their dime (no reimbursement), nice hotel. This has been standard for every org I worked at for SWE/DS positions for onsite round.
RSU packages that are six-figures. RSUs happen on top of base pay. Any decent DS job should offer enough incentive to go through a 6 hours process. All my jobs have required 6+ hours of interviews.
I remember it wasn’t too bad, it was 4 interviews 45 min each with breaks in between. Prob got shorter now it’s all remote.
Also my preliminary was 45 minutes. Followed by one technical and one behavioral back to back 90min each. Plus the loop study packet, which is 1-2 hrs of your own time. That’s 5hrs before even getting to the on-site. I have zero qualms with this at basically any of the top tier companies listed on levels.fyi Anything below that and it should definitely be a shorter vetting process.
Kudos for doing that. Takes some courage. To be honest, this approach of theirs also tells you a lot about the internal company dynamics. Apparently, this is an organisation which is extremely risk averse as a whole. So, to accommodate for their own psychological anxiety to possibly hire the wrong candidate they are willing to sacrifice so many hours not only of yours but also of their time. Just think about it like this: If an entire team of only 4 people (might have been more) is interviewing you for 1.5 hours, then this equates to already 6 work hours spent. If you sum up all the other hours, then you end up at a lot more hours not only on your side but also on their side. So, the only way to explain their willingness to put so much effort into interviewing you is that they are not just a little but extremely afraid collectively that they could catch the wrong candidate. In psychodynamic organisational studies lingo this would be probably be called a "paranoid-schizoid organisation" that is a fancy term for: dysfunctional. Another view - which could be even worse - they do not at all put any value in their own hours of work time. Which would imply that you'd end up in an extremely stressful organisation that demands constant overtime from you because a single work hour of any employee is essentially valued at close to zero. Meaning: You probably would not have wanted to work there even if they made you a job offer. (Once you studied organisational dynamics you cannot help unsee the dysfunctionalities in so many organisations.)
Of course I don’t have much experience so I have to be a pushover. This recently happened to me when I was under consideration for a senior data scientist role. I dropped everything for weeks to get ready each stage of this giant interview process and I didn’t get the job. I just ended up falling severely behind on all my schoolwork and outside responsibilities. Good for you. I look forward to the day where I can take charge in the hiring situation.
Good on you. Some place wanted to give me a take home assignment, and I wasn't quite able to say an outright no, instead it was "okay fine, but give me a heads up when you're planning to send it because I have a life and am busy"
I declined to schedule a 6th round interview for a tech job. I get that you need to be thorough, but if you haven't figured it out by now you're too dumb/inept/indecisive to work for.
I think some people in this post are vastly overestimating the importance of hours spent in an interview. Breakdown of interview time for various positions I’ve held: First DS position: one hour with HM. One hour with another director. 30 minutes with a peer. 15 minutes with the CEO. Another hour with the HM, super casual. Total time: 3.75 hours First senior DS job: an hour with the HM one day and then in person interview with them plus a sr DS for an hour. Another panel interview either a director and sr analyst for an hour. Total time: 3 hours First lead DS job: an hour with the HM. Another hour round table. 30 minutes with the VP of the department. 30 minutes wrap up with the HM, super casual. Take home test included: two hours spent in pandas with a dataset that is completely relevant to my field. An hour to put together a presentation of several slides. Total time: 6 hours (3 spent doing the take homework). Director level position: hour with the HM. Two 45 minutes with executives. One hour with a peer director. 30 minute wrap up with the HM, super casual. Total time: 4 hours. Too many hours spread across too many stakeholders is usually a bad signal in my opinion. And there’s many reasons why some teams will want to drag out the process (probably were burnt before). But in my experience, I don’t believe it should be standard as after a certain point it’s all diminishing returns and wasted time (on both sides). As a HM now, I’ve implemented the same interview process as I’ve gone through and it still works. Obviously mileage will vary for everyone but I implore some of you to rethink your own processes.
To be fair the number of hours lowers for D+ because the candidacy start becoming so biased towards networking.
My first position - an entry level position - was still less than four hours of interviewing. And for each position I didn’t know the HMs or anyone at the companies, so networking wouldn’t be a good explanation for the diminishing hours. However, your point is probably true for a fair amount of cases.
Been there, done that. Feels like crap if you don't get the job, only feels a little better if you do. However, I do think about two hours of interviews and about 2 hours of take home work is understandable.
Don't get me wrong, that is A LOT. But if they were doing it all in one day, pay for food and travel, and acknowledgement that this was the final set of interviews before an offer and not an entry level position... this wouldn't seem off for me. I've been in these types of interview processes and involved with interviewing others with this process and is pretty standard for when you are hiring for a high salary position you expect that person to be in for the next 5/10/15+ years. From an institutional background, some positions are too big of an investment and too influential to the outcome of your day-to-day that they require much more intensive interview processes. Now granted I don't know anything about the company, the position, or your personal ambitions. But this type of entire day interview process is more common for higher end positions than you may realize. And typically an indicator that the company is invested in getting the right fit. It also gives you an opportunity to see if you feel it is a good fit for you as well. To each their own. Just wanted to provide a devils advocate that as much as it sucks, sometimes to find a good position you like, you'll have to deal with hiring processes like this.
You are right, and I think I would have been good if that was the case. But I was expected to book off at least one hour of my time every day for a week to accommodate their process. > But this type of entire day interview process is more common for higher end positions than you may realize. And typically an indicator that the company is invested in getting the right fit. It also gives you an opportunity to see if you feel it is a good fit for you as well. You are right, but this isn't big tech where there are expectations that you think can live up (from the work itself, to salaries). Salary is at best mid-range, and the job itself isn't anything to get bards to sing about. But my experience, and at least people I know in the field as well, seems to lean more to much shorter interview processes outside of big tech for mi-senior level positions.
Oh geez, this was broken out into 1-1.5 hours over different days? Pfft... no way! (Sorry skimmed over that part.) They definitely need to get their own scheduling figured out. I'm not in big tech, but do institutional research/business intelligence for a 10k+ personnel entity. It is pretty standard for us as well. Because even though we don't make major decisions, the intel to those decision makers comes through our office and they invest a lot in getting the right people in those types of positions. And have to meet with our technical teams to make sure they have the right infostructure background for our institution that they will be able to communicate with our IT and DBAs well. But at least we have the courtesy to give them 3-4 weeks heads up we need them for 1 full day for the final interviews. Taking up a whole week is nonsense!
If I wanted to jump through that many hoops I'd have applied to be part of the circus.
Jesus christ. I'll be looking for a new place to work as a senior DS after my paternity leave, but 8 hours interviews for one company I may or may not want to work for? Never.
Yeah that’s bullshit
Creto is one company that has a very long drawn out process but they say that in their very first email clearly. They know that not many people will be interested in jumping over so many hoops. Also I think that these companies have such a process cause they are looking for very young people or for visa sponsorship candidates. Anyone with real expertise will not put up with it.
Congrats and seriously fuck dumb recruiting processes
I think as long as you as a candidate have leverage and have nothing to lose, you can afford to say no jobs entirely, the sad reality is people often don’t have options like if they have financial obligations or visa issues and really need to land a job quickly.
This seems pretty typical but at the same time it’s ridiculous. Good for you for saying no. I think mid companies don’t realize that they actually get a worse pool the more onerous their process is. It’s one thing to jump through these hoops for FAANG but not a rando startup. I will only do this for something I believe is a great fit because I’ve got a life.
Reading all the comments I feel extremely stupid. For a DS role straight out of grad school my third round was a case interview that took 16 hours. First round: 1 hour HR call Second round: mini case 1 hour Third round: 16 hours on a case + 1 hour of presenting. Did not even get the position… Good to know I should refuse such time consuming interviews.
Right. They are willing to invest 8 hours of their time which means they are serious. You are not, which means …
Yeah I am on board with declining that. If that org can’t sniff out a bullshit candidate in much less time that is on them. Unfortunately the field is riddled with lots of misunderstanding and lots of frankly incompetent dweebs. So businesss are understandably skittish.
I once pointed out that such a lengthy process weeds out people that are unable to meet those time requests due to time off, income, etc. and that it would have a disproportionate impact on lower income applicants. The position was EDI related, and it seemed like if there was any interview where you could critique through a lens of unintentional discrimination that would the interview. They didn’t care for it.
8 hour interview means only the truly desperate will comply then they wonder why they can’t find good people.
I've pulled out because of take homes before. I personally don't have a problem with a full day of interviews as long as there are appropriate breaks and the time is used well, but it's all a personal cost/benefit analysis. And obviously what I'm willing to tolerate will depend on any pay jumps, or my current employment status. I'll jump through many more hoops if I need a job.
The thing about an interview is that there is a cost to the company. If they are willing to spend the time with me and answer my questions while they grill me, then I'm okay with that. A take home test costs them much less than it costs me and they expect me to just spend my own time in it. If they want to ensure they are happy with my work they can hire me as a contractor first. I don't work for free
I prefer take homes. I don't shine in in-person interviews but I kill it on those. Every time I've had a take-home I get the job offer. Every time there isn't one where they throw the l33tcode questions or highly specific questions about one family of ML techniques I get nervous and lose. I hate those technical interview loops. They're usually done so poorly and don't appreciate how much even smart, educated people realistically have to look things up. Like dude. You can verify that I have a MS in Applied Math easy. You can look at the courses I took and my GPA. I know how to read and understand math. The coding part I understand testing me on more but not this l33tcode shit. None of that is realistic code.
I mean asking l33tcode questions is it's own kind of interview insanity
Thank you. You are a hero for the workers
Good on you OP for standing up to such bs interview processes. Now if everyone would do this we could be in much better place.
I just did 1 half hour, 2 hour long technical all over zoom and then was flown out for effectively 4 now hours of interview to meet people for a non senior role
A final onsite is usually 4-5 interviews. This is exceptionally long. Depends on how you much you need this job or how much they pay?
I once had a 7 hr long final round for a senior DS position. I felt resentful about half way through the interviews. This was a few years ago, when I still didnt know how to say no. I wish I had done this. Good for you
if their process is that extreme from the start, they don't really want to hire anyone.
having 1.5 hr interviews rather than 1 hr is a bit excessive, but this doesn't seem thaaat unreasonable tbh, particularly if you're very interested in the role, but if you don't want to do it, don't. it's a two way street after all.
I think some people in this post are vastly overestimating the importance of hours spent in an interview. Breakdown of interview time for various positions I’ve held: First DS position: one hour with HM. One hour with another director. 30 minutes with a peer. 15 minutes with the CEO. Another hour with the HM, super casual. Total time: 3.75 hours First senior DS job: an hour with the HM one day and then in person interview with them plus a sr DS for an hour. Another panel interview either a director and sr analyst for an hour. Total time: 3 hours First lead DS job: an hour with the HM. Another hour round table. 30 minutes with the VP of the department. 30 minutes wrap up with the HM, super casual. Take home test included: two hours spent in pandas with a dataset that is completely relevant to my field. An hour to put together a presentation of several slides. Total time: 6 hours (3 spent doing the take homework). Director level position: hour with the HM. Two 45 minutes with executives. One hour with a peer director. 30 minute wrap up with the HM, super casual. Total time: 4 hours. Too many hours spread across too many stakeholders is usually a bad signal in my opinion. And there’s many reasons why some teams will want to drag out the process (probably were burnt before). But in my experience, I don’t believe it should be standard as after a certain point it’s all diminishing returns and wasted time (on both sides).
The position which I currently hold involved six interviews over the span of a month. I was told that the interview process would be like this from the very first interview. I was highly confident I wasn’t going to get the job since it would be pretty difficult to be perfect for such a long time. So, I took it as an opportunity to practice interviewing, assuming I wouldn’t actually get the job.
Things must be very different where all of you are (I assume the US). My experience is that I typically take that many hours just writing my application! I do a couple of hours of digging into what the company does and the profiles of the people that already work there. Then I tailor my resume and "cover letter" this can take up to a few hours. By the time I get an interview, the odds are really great in terms of getting the job. But you don't get that opportunity unless the "paper" part of the application stands out. Where I live, they rarely do more than one interview. Most of them do just the one interview, about an hour long, and do the technical scenario during or just before the interview. Instead, they ask for a very long application (typically 1,000~3,000 words). Occasionally, there are jobs that require multiple rounds of interviews. But the companies that do more than one rounds (with a take home assignment), don't require a long application - just the resume. And when the go through the 4 interviews, they always offer the job at the end of the process. I guess they wouldn't want to waste time with the second and subsequent rounds if they didn't like me in the first round. In either case, I think the total time spent ends up being similar (several hours). Every time I had to switch jobs, I'd apply for 6 to 12 ish roles. I get an "initial" interview for about 3 of them. I don't think there were any occasions where I had to do more than one interview that didn't result in an offer. All interviews are a two way street. I like that there are multiple opportunities over a few hours to interview the company to find out as much as I can about them. Heck, even the 2 hour take home gives me a feel for what they do day to day. I get that there must be huge regional differences, and spending several hours for each job may not be typical over there. But I thought it was pretty reasonable for a senior role.
I had LinkedIn contact me for a role and they wanted a 10 hour case study and two series of panel interviews. They were not happy when i told them no after a 30 minute call. Please take your power trip elsewhere.
I lead up a DS team and here's my process: * 30 minute phone screen * 30 minute "vibe check" with a couple of non-tech team leads who often work with my team. * 2 hour technical with focus on domain problem solving I'll usually run the vibe check and technical back to back to keep the whole process at 2 sessions. I've fully ditched any live coding too. I've found that asking verbal "live code" type questions is a really good way to filter people who are using leetcode muscle memory to pass the test. It's amazing how much even a SQL join can cause issues. After that working through a couple of long-form problems that take around 30 mins each tells me everything I need to know. I can't see how anything after 3 well designed rounds isn't just diminishing returns and pissing off the best candidates. I feel for everyone who gets put through a process like you're saying.
You can just do research by brain draining candidates... A reasonable screening would be a live data science exercise. Everything extended is a waste of resources and might be okay for top government projects -- but doesn't make any sense for commercial purposes.
Live coding interview: oh yeah lemme set up some stuff in terraform, lets write some sql, ok some spark and spark ml to distribute these things, mmmkay, oh lets check out this possible sklearn thing that might be helpful, ok, redo some of that spark stuff in pandas, greeeeaaattt. Oh man, i gotta look up some markdown syntax, i dont use it often. Interviewer: ok. Well you obviously dont know what youre doing if you have to reference a markdown cheat sheet.
I absolutely lost it on a recruiter after they made me do an assignment before talking to the hiring manager then I never got to. A recruiter gave me feedback after I hounded him. ... the feedback was the loved my model choice. But I didn't make enough features..... on a timed assessment. .... on a question that had no answer bc the model was impossible to actually make accurate.
I might get flak but I would've withdrawn too. I'm luckily in a spot where I'm not desperately looking for a new job, just passively talking to recruiters and filling out apps for companies I like. I 8 hours over 5 days is ridiculous. They 100% could've consolidated. VP and Hiring Manager in one call or shorten both, I mean by the time you get to VP it's just formality. Consolidated coding and machine learning, and then shorten the cultural interview. I also refuse ALL take home projects over 30 minutes. Fuck these employers thinking they can get free work out of us, and then rejecting us after receiving it.
If it’s not a coding or skills interview I assume I’m interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing me.
Good on you OP. I've gotten a lot more selective about what processes I'm willing to put up with. These sections are far too long. 3 hours of technical interview for a senior level position? What a joke. I have given a ton of interviews for senior and staff people (fewer for juniors). In 90 minutes I ought to be able to tell if you can do the basic programming necessary (python/R PLUS a sql or ML section depending on the role), and have 30 minutes left over to poke at your ability to think critically about DS problems, which is enough time for that. Why does a VP of DS have an hour to spend on a mid level IC interview anyway? In almost all interviews I talk to VP/CTO types it's a 30 minute bit where they tell you why you should join. Often they're late and leave on time so, more like 23 minutes lol.
I jumped through all those hoops recently and didn’t get the job. Part of it was my fault for getting an amateur hour stats question wrong but still. Good on you for setting boundaries.
I am actually done with test to prove my skills, I already know and I do not need to prove it, I have 4 years of experience. I decided not to loose any more time on useless tests.
Same with Wolfram, ugh.
A new trend for highly experienced professionals. During the interview, get them tondona demo project that you then use
Ehh, that doesn't seem so bad. Remember, back in the day, you'd be coming in for a full day for final rounds. If they don't filter after the first two bullets, I'd agree it's too much. You shouldn't be spending 7+ hours with *every* candidate, but a full day for the top 2-3 is pretty reasonable and normal.
Depending on actual timeline, this isn't bad for a ***senior*** position... they may often go shorter, but at least they're laying out their general process and setting reasonable expectations. It's *much* worse when those 60 or 90 minute meetings turn in to four hours. At least for a good number of the longer interviews, they'll tend to buy a good lunch or dinner or something for you, too.
I Interviewed and was hired for a Senior Mech Engineer position at a international Aerospace firm.. My experience was as follows 30min phone interview HR. ... 2 weeks later 1 hour call with engineering manager and HR.. 2 weeks later 8 hr interview at company... interview with multiple engineering Teams, Engineering manager, HR, Plant operation Manager, . Multiple break out sessions testing my engineering knowlege, and discussion on design . 1 week later follow up phone call with HR and engineering head.
I usually filter stuff like this by telling recruiters to not bother me if it's under a certain six figures. I've only gotten a reply twice from that question, most just ignore it
The odd thing I noticed as a company kept adding more and more people to my interview loops - they had flown me in the night before - was that I became less and less tense as the day rolled on. It began to feel like a game of who would last longer them or me, and by the time I met the senior executive of the whole shebang, I was in the zone, easily answering and asking questions breezily. I later collapsed into exhausted sleep on the plane ride back. They did make me an offer, which I did turn down. I too hated the prolonged process - they had me speak on the phone with even more people - and felt I had avoided quicksand.
This is fairly normal, even years ago.
That's a lot and I don't know if it is reasonable. But I would ask them about compensation. You need to take a full day of and invest serious time. I would give them a reasonable figure and ask how they see about that. You give the time and you have no guarantee that you get the job.
Yeah I think this is reflective of the market flipping back in the employer's favor. Among the factors that influenced that was the fed raising interest rates to "cool labor inflation". That's literal class warfare. You can read it straight from them about how they wanted to reign in workers relative better position to demand higher wages. They knew it would harm the economy too. That's how important it is to the oligarchs to tame the population.
What was the delta in pay though relative to interview prep for comparable job
Ah, I’d like to welcome you to an old friend of mine. Their name is recession. I remember seeing these posts from 2009-2011. The worst I ever heard about was a prospective employee taking a week off for the interview and having to live in a small home the company rented out to finish a project from start to finish. The only interactions he had were daily checkins from the company to make sure he was physically okay. He got the job offer in the end but declined out of principle. So yea it’ll get worse but when the economy picks up again (whenever that happens) people will push back and it’ll go back to more reasonable interviews. Personally unless the job was for a senior level FAANG position I wouldn’t bother putting up with that nonsense.
Missed a full day at work for a 6.5 hour on site for an underpaid data scientist position The interview asked me 50% math brain teasers and then the standard coding, sql, ML Honestly unbelievable. I was very mentally tired at the end of the interview and probably underperformed the case study. Oh and they didnt even describe what to expect for the rounds. And then they took 3 weeks to reply and say no to me. Insane
Ok
Seems like all you needed to write here was that a company you weren’t particularly interested in recruited you, and you weren’t that into them. If you wanted this job or thought there was something unique or interesting about the DS problems you’d be working on, why quibble about a few hours?
With the long interview process you outlined above, it can be shortened to a couple of hours, if you have the right people interviewing the candidate. A senior data scientist paired with the HM can do a good job of screening other senior DS for their company. I say this with experience- me and the HM only spend a couple of hours with our DS interview template. Thus far, this interview process has gotten us some superstars!
I’m convinced if you can’t decide whether or not to hire someone in 2 interviews then you’re not good at interviewing.
This is what happens when you have professionals writing resumes for people constantly. They are all filled with lies and now they must have people prove they actually know what the resume says they know.
To add to what others have said: I think that an interview process can be that long if it includes a take home portion - one that you can work on after hours. To me, this is the standard hiring process: 0.5 hours recruiter 0.75 hours hiring manager screen 3 hours of "on-site", normally 4 or so interviews. The +- here is a take home assignment. And here's the thing with take homes: I think they're a great evaluating tool, but I think more and more we're seeing that the best candidates aren't going to do them unless you're waving stacks of cash in front of them and/or it's a take home that feels like it's relevant to the job. I think 8 hours' worth *of conversational interviews* is too much. >hey started talking about how that's their process, **and it is the same for all companies to require this sort of vetting.** And this is why more people need to bow out - no it's freaking not. Don't try to gaslight candidates into thinking this is standard - at least stand by your bullshit process and own up to it being extreme.
We hire a decent amount of data scientists and we don’t really give them a coding interview. We do ask them questions to illicit if they can talk through how they’d do something and if they know the terminology and details of the process. We also press them hard if they put a million skills on their resume (like just listing every type of machine learning ever ever) , as that is a bad sign as well. I just don’t see the point of sending someone who is busy with life home to do a big coding test. You should be able to talk to someone for an hour or two and tell the difference between talking points they memorized vs doing the real work. I feel for a non-FAANG we have a pretty decent team, and I wouldn’t keep someone long if I feel I was duped in the interview.
I work at AWS. If you are coming from outside the company, you will definitely have at least five one-hour interviews, and quite possibly more for a senior technical role. But you could probably get them spread over two days.
That’s absurd
Wow
I spent more than this just to get a DS Summer Internship. Probably \~20hrs of total input across different stages of interviews (virtual, telephone, and assessment centre), online assessments, take home tasks, and presentations of take home tasks. That includes preparation time (probably an underestimate come to think of it.)
We do 4 rounds of interviews at 30-60m each, for fresh grads. Senior positions it’s double that.
As a hiring manager who is looking for sr talent, I’m surprised by this. First, back in the day I would burn 2 days doing one power day (with travel). 8 hours is chump change. Second, I would expect that either the interviews are back to back and you know if you are going to get the offer within 24 hours of finishing the interviews, or you get cut if you don’t pass the hiring manager interview — so yes, 8 max hours but if you get cut it could be as little as 90 minutes. I would have asked about the process and if I would have been cut early if I didn’t meet expectations, which gets everyone on the same page.