There are 3 stages to the whole interview process.
1. Hiring Manager round with Head of Data Science.
2. Python coding challenge
3. Final Interview with head of data Science and another Data Scientist
The profile required computer vision, although I had not worked on it in the recent past but still got shortlisted.
1. The first stage was the head of Data Science is get to know call and pretty pleasant. I got a compliment about my CV being very good (despite having very little computer vision experience).
2. Second stage: Python coding round, pretty simple and if one is aware of basic python algorithms and their implementation, this would be a breeze. (Know your pandas, plotting, sorting and simple algorithms — nothing too complex here)
3. Third stage: This is where the interview experience gets worse, in my case, it was only the head of Data Science who was available for the interview. He wanted very specific answers about certain topics (basically what he expects). There could be other ways to look at a problem and solution. But he was pretty adamant and stuck around with me to get an answer for 1 question for which we were running in circles.
Now here comes the interesting part, he starts asking me about computer vision questions — I answered each and every one of them very clearly (and yes as exactly he would like). He then proceeded to say that your CV doesn’t have a real ‘computer vision project’.
I asked what is a ‘real’ computer vision project — he mentioned the one which uses CNN.
This was a very poor interview experience in my opinion particularly the last round. I suspect the head of Data Science just didn’t want to select and he disregarded my whole DS career — no questions were asked on the past projects etc.
It was a bit confusing, I received a compliment in the first stage and no ‘CNN’ in the last stage. Don’t quite know what’s the right expectation from the candidate.
The following day, I got a generic rejection email.