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Comment by ZeroCool2u | Hacker News Reader

This is a damn good idea. Like almost everyone else, I don't really enjoy the leetcode grind, but it seemed like a necessary evil.

I'm currently tasked with hiring a senior data scientist and I'm dealing with figuring out the take home case study right now. Would be great if you guys did something similar that wasn't for pure CRUD apps, but also included a normal data science case study as well as included things like unit tests, enforced a PR workflow, and other MLOps tasks like quantization, A/B+regression testing, and monitoring, etc. I've been asking candidates questions about those topics for a while and it just feels pretty tricky to come up with what are fair and reasonable questions that aren't too easy and at the same time can be graded objectively.

Probably a lot to bite off for your team right now, but I'm just sitting here wishing I didn't have to come up with this case study from scratch atm, so there's my dream scenario :)

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Please don’t give a take home DS case study. It’s annoying, can take arbitrary amounts of time and very hard to judge well with. You can come up with some good interview questions if you want, (hmu if you want an example). Just give that and ask them to talk about their favorite ml model. You can easily figure the masses from the good ones.

Would gladly take any questions you'd suggest!

To be clear though, I'm not a big fan of take homes either and we're trying to limit ours to less than 2 hours total time spent and give folks a week to find those 2 hours, so it's not overly burdensome.

To be honest, if the employer gives proper consideration to the fact that personal time is being spent on a take home task (sounds like you're doing that if its a 2 hour task over a week), I much prefer take home to coding "live" or answering questions. The latter options just don't feel natural, and aren't at all reflective of my actual skills.

Thank you! Data science interviews are definitely on our roadmap, but unfortunately we won't be able to get there within the next quarter. Biggest reason for this? Nobody on our team has data science experience! I'm not going to pretend like we know how to interview data scientists when none of us actually have the experience, but we will be spending time collaborating with (if not straight up hiring) a few data scientists to help build out our first few DS interviews.

Well if you need some feedback, feel free to reach out. I'm not a manager about to suffer from interview burn out or anything, but would be happy to see something like Litebulb lighten the load in the future for both sides of the hiring process.

Appreciate this tons, because we'll definitely need the help! Would actually love to connect over email (gary@litebul.io) or directly in a chat (https://calendly.com/gary-j-lin/30min).

I don't know how much hiring you've done, but in my experience, everything you're asking for does not correlate to hiring quality employees. If you're hiring a senior role, there should be demonstrated experience in these areas you can discuss in a 30 minute interview. If they don't have that experience already and need a take home case study to demonstrate it, then they aren't fit for a senior role. Even junior candidates should be assessed by ML portfolio work and taught the rest.

Your job as an interviewer isn't to come up with questions that aren't too easy or grade homework assignments. It's to assess a candidate's experience and ability to do the role you're interviewing for. Making a grind interview means you'll drive away the best candidates that have options and find your process disrespectful of their time and experience.

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