i was ghosted for a week they asked for more time i was ghosted for a couple more weeks
and then sorry you were really really good candidate but we couldn't see
your code was up to snuff with our other data engineers
it happened it really did happen today i'm going to talk about how i took over 30 hours
on a take-home assignment and then after moving through three different rounds of the interview
i couldn't pass it
how's it going guys if you have watched any of my videos before you'll know that this channel
is about hacking your growth and getting a six-figure salary in some sort of technical field
as soon as you can but if also it's about managing your finances and making sure you learn from your
mistakes that's why my name is andrew and this is professor meatball he is a ph doctorate from
the university of corgell today i'm gonna talk about how i flunked my coinbase interview process
it's a long and winding story with a lot of plot twists and interesting takeaways and at the end
you're gonna answer questions like how can i avoid andrew's stupid dummy dumb mistakes how can i also
practice for take homes in the safety of my own home and how do i smash the like button and the
subscribe button if i'm new because i appreciate andrew's work and i want to be able to learn as
much as i can by keeping up and staying up to date which includes clicking that bell button when it
comes up the beginning of the journey i had the opportunity to choose between two different paths
i had the opportunity to choose between a data science path and a data engineering path and the
questions that i had to answer were how much do i like the team how much do i like the functions of
each of the roles and how much do i think i have relevant experiences for either one coinbase is a
medium-sized company so data scientists had the run of the mill for the kinds of visualizations
and analytical processes that they needed to take care of but there wasn't a lot of scripting there
wasn't as much scripting as i wanted and there wasn't the same engineering workflow that i've
come to be accustomed to at other data science organizations so i asked the recruiter about
the data engineering position as well and this was a team that i really connected with
i really loved talking to the manager of the data engineering team in fact i liked talking
to him so much i ended up going down all the way to san francisco if it's not clear i'm
geographically two hours away from san francisco when there's bad traffic so it was a labor of love
to go down to a coffee shop near the manager's workplace and have a coffee with him and it was
cool we had conversations about slice of life we had conversations about what we would do on
the actual job but we also had conversations about our own aspirations and passions and the kinds of
activities that we get into when we're out of work so i got to know him on a personal level in order
to have had the opportunity to talk to the manager directly i had to pass the first round interview
so a couple of things to note about that interview it's going to be a lot of formality it's going
to be about how much work have you done in this specific organization industry level or product
level or some type of star format question that you have to formulate in the top of mind now the
best way to prepare for these kind of interview questions is to have three or four specific
situations that you want to talk about in the star format so remember it's always situation task
action and result make sure to talk fluently about the situation as if you were the person who was
driving the action talk about the metrics you're able to drive and talk about how you're able to
work with cross-functional roles around the topic of the main mission that you all had in common if
you were the agent of change in this organization or this project all the better to you if you don't
have a lot of experiences like this uh it's a good time to get some projects under your belt that
exemplify the kind of behavior that we're looking for if you guys are wondering about what kind
of projects would make sense to put in a resume then please drop a comment down below so that i
can talk more about it later so i passed the first round interview i passed the optional coffee date
with the manager that i opted in for and then came the take home and that's the most important part
is because take homes in my opinion are the double uh they are very unfair when it comes to the
amount of time that you have to put in as well as their time grading it imagine a teacher that knows
the answers and can go off a scantron one two one two one two three right that's a scaled process
where all educational foundations are built off of but it's less fair when it comes to a process
of trying to pass an interview you see you have to put in a couple of hours in fact i have a special
rule for how many hours you should put it into each of these interviews i'm going to answer the
question that rosa g asked in the comments here hey guys so i was contacted by someone through
linkedin asking me to complete a data science challenge for an internship i applied to however
the company seems fishy to me they only have one employee on linkedin and is the person who sent me
the task i'm not sure if i should even spend my time on this given that i'm not confident this
company is real i have no idea why anyone would pretend to have a company and send challenges
to people though law rosa you have good reason to law because this is an important topic how
can you tell how much time you should spend on a take-home assignment how much clout should you put
into each of these roles when you're considering how much time should i put into them well here
is my rule of thumb think about how much you want to work for this company from a scale of 1
to 10. all right double it and that's the maximum number of hours you should spend on the take home
if you end up spending up to that amount and you've capped out and you still haven't finished
it then you send it off with a message that says this take home was actually not industry standard
i am experienced in my field and it took me more than x y and z hours to finish this
it means that you are trying to deliver a take-home that is disproportionately
time-consuming for my other opportunities that i have to pursue in the job search process this will
separate the earnestly well-intentioned companies who are just trying to modulate their experience
and set off the most appropriately reasonable process as possible with the scam companies that
clearly don't give two flips about whether or not you complete it they're looking for some free data
science engineering or other type of work from you and then you'll be providing it for gratis
and then they will give you your rejection at the end of the process anyway for rosa's specific
situation it sounds like she is concerned whether or not this company is valid at all in which case
you have to then ask yourself if you care less than one out of a scale of one to ten to work on
this company because you're afraid that they might not be legitimate then it really might not be
worth spending any time on this take home however if you're somewhere between the one to four range
of caring not so much about this company but maybe just enough to try and give it a chance
then it could be worth spending up to a few hours putting time practicing your craft and seeing
someone else grade it for free there you go we often take grading for granted because we've
all been through high school we've been through college most of us we've been through graduate
school some of us uh where all of these proctors and graders are telling us yes no yes no when in
adult life we don't have graders so much as we have bosses who are always leering over our work
and making sure that it's up to their standards it's not so much testing whether or not we
understand a specific concept it's just whether or not something is done that's why it's so important
to be able to work with graders to understand where you are lacking in terms of the experience
that you are trying to exemplify so what was this take home that took me 30 hours to complete it
was a json file of data that i had to manipulate with pandas and build a model with scikit-learn
and then connect to a sql alchemy database that i had to create myself that sounds tricky but at
the end of the day it was just time consuming it was data that had errors on purpose it was data
that i had to manually cram into the data pipeline that i was trying to build and at the end of the
day i had to also come up with a creative model that i regressed on the data in order to predict
something and there was actually not any more framing on top of that question so what was that
something supposed to be well i chose an ensemble model that regressed on a secondary metric so i
wanted to be clever or sneaky or the very least i wanted to be something that was unique in order
to prove my candidacy right i understand the question enough that i wanted to be able to say
do a project that was non-linear and it was custom after spending oh somewhere around 15-ish 20 hours
on the process i turned in my work and i got back from my nice coffee date man
that the work needed some improvements so he said with no feedback how about you try again and that
was hard to hear but i wanted to do my best so i put another 10 hours in that's a day and a half
more or less of work into this project i changed up how i tuned the hyper parameters i looked into
my eda process and see where am i supposed to like do the fine tuning here or do the fine-tuning here
and all of that afterwards i got the rejection it didn't happen all at once i was ghosted for
a week they asked for more time i was go sit for a couple more weeks and then sorry you were really
really good candidate but we couldn't see your code was up to snuff with our other data engineers
i get it i understand i'm not an engineer by trade i'm a data scientist joma has made plenty
of jokes about how we are not able to reverse linked lists but this take-home spoke to me
it was something that i really understood and something that i really felt like i could pass
sometimes it doesn't work out right especially when you make a human connection with a company
it can feel really bad especially since i also believed in the product and i really wanted to
work on the problems that they had coming up in the future all that said i am in the crypto
space now i am working on blockchain i am a data scientist still at the end of the day you have to
remember that you are trying to build something for yourself so these take homes yeah they
can be a chore they can be unfair homework but they're still able to help you grow in a way that
training theoretically and building projects with toy data don't have the same ability to prepare
you for if anything give take-homes a chance as much as i dislike them and that's saying something
for me if you like this video i really appreciate a like it helps the algorithm it's not for me you
know i like seeing likes but it's really for more people to see this content just like yourself
and hitting that subscribe button will probably help but you're probably subscribed already
as always i put i show you a question at the end of each of these videos and today is no exception
i wanted to ask you well what is the difference between my sequel sql server and postgresql
leave your comments down below and i'll pick a right answer out of them
to give a free consultation to data science or otherwise
for now but not for forever i appreciate you guys i'll talk to you later peace
it took me more than x y and z hours to finish this
it means that you are trying to deliver a take home that is disproportionately time consuming
for my other opportunities that i have to pursue in the job search