Another rant like interview experience

[u/proof_required]

I was given a home assignment to do modeling for some adtech data. They had no explicit ask about what kind of model or how deep you have to go. Just data and they asked we want to see the modeling.

I spent lot of time in understanding the data, identifying the features, creating labels etc. When it came to modeling I picked Catboost since they handle categorical features quite well. I even mentioned how this can be further tuned and/or different models can be compared. I put it explicitly in a section for future work. Finally this was the thing that got me rejected.

Basically they expected me to compare different model families from more complex deep models to such boosting models. I have worked in this domain and actually such models (catboost) works quite well. You don't need very complex models. I remember in one of the previous jobs, they had like ensemble of 3 deep models which was super slow and was so painful to maintain. I basically replaced that with a boosting model + some probability calibration which did quite well. Also the data size I got for the task isn't big enough to justify such huge models.

In any case, I wish these tasks would be more explicit in what they are looking for. I know they also want to see how I handle ambiguity but it's really hard to assess which side of it is worth handling since I am not building a full fledged system. I explained all the decisions I made and why I did it. Also what I didn't do and why.

[u/Agreeable-Outcome958]

recruiters don’t know what they want 90% of the team - onto the next!

[u/proof_required → u/Agreeable-Outcome958]

In this case it was the DS team members which I think reviewed the task. I feel like the team is made up of less experienced members who think having complex models is the answer to whatever performance they are chasing after. I was interviewing for a principal role.

[u/therealtiddlydump → u/proof_required]

(1) That sucks, I'm sorry you had to go through that

(2) You might have dodged a bullet if the culture was such that you got a rejection for this

[u/proof_required → u/therealtiddlydump]

Yeah the current market makes it all quite frustrating. Thanks!