3 ms·

“So why did you use Mapreduce over other solutions?" You almost never get asked that in an interview though.

• disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  I ask the equivalent DS question in a lot of my interviews. Generally people tell me about the hot new XGBoost model they fitted, and I ask them how much better it was than logistic regression. 9/10 they don't have a good answer. That being said, my favourite answer was from a candidate who told me that Kaggle contestants didn't use log reg, and therefore it was a bad choice. Oddly enough, we didn't hire that candidate. OTOH, I've worked at places where they wouldn't hire you if you didn't talk about your awesome neural networks/XGboost experience, so it really depends on the interviewer.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Especially as more senior engineer I would love to discuss issues like this and talk about pros, cons and trade offs of different decisions because that’s the world I live in. But from my experience most interviewers aren’t interested.
• the_only_law 5y ago
  I’d kill for a question like this at least compared to things like trivia questions.
• dvtrn 5y ago
  "I would have used other solutions such as....but there were people in the room who had more 'tenure', 'experience' and 'clout' who insisted on mapreduce so that's what my leadership team bought in on". I'd love to be able to say this in an interview one day. And I'd be telling the truth (not about Mapreduce but something else, let me tell you about the time I lost an argument with a Senior/Staff Engineer who wanted to write an entire PHP library for log files on a single-serving linux host instead of using cron and logrotate). But like you mentioned, it's a type of question I've yet to be asked. Depending on the room (ala "read the room") I might volunteer that bit of information in a more 'interview friendly' way.
• deleted 5y ago
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