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It's often less...adversarial. I work somewhere in the middle of biology/neuroscience and ML. Interviews for essentially the same job (e.g., building brain-ins
by mattkrause 6y ago
It's often less...adversarial.
I work somewhere in the middle of biology/neuroscience and ML. Interviews for essentially the same job (e.g., building brain-inspired robots) are hilariously different depending on how the org views itself.
In a "science" organization, the interviews mostly involved talking about what I've done in the past and how I'd approach new issues (technical and behavioral). There were certainly a few probing questions about things that seemed designed to check up on claims, but my experience seemed mostly taken at face value. A coding test, for example, was skipped because an interviewer had already seen some of my code and thought it was fine.
"Tech" interviewers seemed to want everything "proved" on-site during an all-day slog. I reversed strings and traversed graphs on a whiteboard. Someone quizzed me on facts and figures about the human eye (which they were reading out of the same book I learned them from). To me, this seems to test immediate recall and stamina/stress tolerance more than anything actually related to my R&D skills.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI think adversarial is the right word for the current style of tech interviewing. It wasn't always this way. Back in the 80s when I first got into tech it was a lot more conversational and in the spirit of "we really need help, what can you do for us?". I think something more akin to a thesis defense would be better than what we're doing now. Prior to the interview have the candidate write up a description of a project they worked on and particularly liked along with a set of slides. Have the candidate send this presentation to the main interviewer who will distribute it to all of the interviewers. The interview then becomes a presentation where interviewers can ask questions about the presentation. I've seen this done in industry, but it was only when we interviewed folks who were PhDs coming from academia - I don't see why we couldn't do this for all kinds of candidates, not just those coming from academia.