Not so dramatic, but I have a traditional CS background and got into ML much later in my career. Last year my company formalized the process to hire ML Enginee

Not so dramatic, but I have a traditional CS background and got into ML much later in my career. Last year my company formalized the process to hire ML Engineers. The interview is the same format as the software engineer round, but with an extra theoretical ML round. I've observed two distinct groups of candidates in the process. One are recent grads with PhDs in ML. Other are people from diverse backgrounds that happened to start working in ML in their current job. The first group tends to excel in the ML theory part, but flunk the leetcode style coding questions. The second group tends to do better in coding, but do worse in the theory part. This is exactly what the process has been designed to do. I am very put off from looking for ML Engineer positions in other companies if they follow a similar process. I know I would fail the interview for my current job. They could get away with it for a while, but I doubt it's sustainability or desirability in the long term.