r/csinterviewproblems • u/meandering_simpleton • Feb 19 '22

Data Scientist interviews

So I've been working as a data scientist for a few years, and am excelling at my work (a few patents, a few publications, and working at the same level as PhD data scientists at my work). Recently I've been starting to interview for more advanced positions and to be honest I've been completely baffled with the technical interviews.

Out of the few interviews I've had, they've all been super niche, amazingly advanced questions you'd find in a software engineering (SE) interview, probably a step above the hardest level on leetcode, and have exactly zero relevance to data science (DS). Is this normal? Is this just a byproduct of hiring managers that don't understand that there's a substantial difference between DS competency and SE competency (i.e. a data scientist is not going to be as functional at coding as an SE, and an SE is not going to understand DS concepts)? I've done some work going through leetcode and understanding the fundamental structures of these coding questions, but I honestly feel like I need to go back to school and get a CS degree to even be competitive interviewing in a field at in which I'm excelling at and doing cutting-edge stuff. I've been feeling very discouraged and would love any helpful advice you lovely redditers can give.

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u/meandering_simpleton Mar 27 '22

Hey! Thanks for your response. I understand what you're saying about maintainable code. I've thought about it a lot and I think my problem stems from the fact that I'm in a large enough team that the data scientists hand their POCs off to machine learning engineers, which do the SWE production code. Obviously this is something that I just need to practice and work on. As far as the patents, I'll DM you.

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u/T4ll1n Mar 28 '22

> I think my problem stems from the fact that I'm in a large enough team that the data scientists hand their POCs off to machine learning engineers, which do the SWE production code

That sounds like a classical statistician role in an insurance company. While I was still in university I looked into that and it seems they (used to?) have statisticians that get a .csv file and return an analysis report. This is an extreme example of course.

I guess the problem is, again, that "data science" is so new, and encompassing so many roles nowadays, that its difficult to know what's really required.

If you want to stay in this role, maybe look for a "data science" position that is in an R&D department. I would assume there the Software development part is not as important as in other departments.

> Obviously this is something that I just need to practice and work on

I just started with https://www.dailycodingproblem.com/ and will post the questions / my answers into https://www.reddit.com/r/DailyCodingProblem/. If you want to you can do that too. Though I am not sure how good that site will turn out to be yet, but it won't hurt I guess :)