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suricatasuricata t1_istj1ms wrote

Reply to comment by vikigenius in [D] How frustrating are the ML interviews these days!!! TOP 3% interview joke by Mogady

> I rarely ever interview for big companies these days for the exact same reason.

I don't know of a big company (as in one of the elites) that would conduct an interview like what OP experienced. They might ask you leetcode questions, but no one is going to ask you to memorize pandas. Between the two, I will take understanding data structures over memorizing pandas any day.

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vikigenius t1_istm2qo wrote

I was focusing more on the Leetcode side of things. The memorization thing was obviously worse and I don't know of any big company that does it either.

I am an NLP Researcher with good research experience. Leetcode is not going to be helpful for me at all. Sure I can take some time and grind leetcode for a month. I used to do competitive programming back when I was in college so it shouldn't be a problem. But I have a full time job and a life. So it just feels like a waste of time for me.

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suricatasuricata t1_istn29a wrote

I completely and totally sympathize with your issues with Leetcode. As someone who never enjoyed competitive programming, I think it is especially frustrating when I realize that it has become the default standard for hiring filters. The way I see it, choosing not to go down that route, seems to at this stage restrict one to very few companies.

In fact, there are way more companies who are finding it easier to set up an automatic hackerrank filter, which invariably involves a competitive programming question.

If you have a PhD, have relevant publications and you can apply for a research role, I suppose you can avoid it, at least at the Big companies.

But for Engineers, IDK, I know folks who are at the Principal/Staff level at G/FB/Amazon and even they have talked about having to undergo at least one Leetcode filter. And to be clear, I am talking about Machine Learning Engineers and not regular Software Engineers.

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fromnighttilldawn t1_isvxdee wrote

My friend just went through an interview where they were asking them about some pandas operator. And it was one of those big companies.

I do believe that many ML interviewers are mentally insane.

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