Read on how to prepare and ace the Data Science interview from our Data Scientist, Lesley Cordero. Lesley describes her experience taking the technical test at leading tech companies, including Facebook and Foursquare.
I have a 20 min technical test for Data Science Intern position. This is my first such interview. What can I expect on the technical test?
I’ve interviewed for many data science positions, including internships, from small start-ups to big companies like Foursquare and Facebook. The types of questions I've encountered have varied a lot, actually.
Sometimes companies will treat their interview process as any other software engineering position and ask traditional coding questions, such as string manipulation, data structures, etc. Websites like HackerRank and LeetCode are awesome online resources that will should properly ramp you up for this kind of interview. Additionally, Cracking the Coding Interview is full of the most commonly asked coding challenges. If you're interested in face-to-face practice, Byte Academy hosts a regular meetup practicing interview questions based on this book's tips.
Companies might actually go into questions more related to a Data Science position. For example, questions on regression, Bayes' Theorem, arithmetic, and distributions commonly come up. Taking a statistics course or two should adequately prepare you for these.
And then there are some companies that feature a mix of the two. To reiterate, it really depends on the company, so making sure you research the company (check Glassdoor) to see what their interview process is like can be the key to knocking these interviews out of the park.
Liked what you read? Checkout Byte Academy's Data Science Immersive and Intro courses.
