I'm interested in what you'd pay the sort of people who could pass these interview questions flawlessly. Even the recipient of the 'generous offer' admitted to not coding, which is what you were looking for.
Everyone in this line of work (probably in every line of work) tends to compare their own abilities with others'. Frankly, I have no idea how I'd solve any of this unless you said 'Knapsack problem, figure out how to implement it' -- even then I'd have to go google stuff. Is this kind of stuff standard for higher level work?
The first one asked me to implement a Naive-Bayes Classifier on Map Reduce from scratch (ie. no Naive-Bayes libraries), gave me real customer data & I was supposed to run the classifier & pick out the list of customers who should be sent emails based on the classifier's results. All in the course of 1 hour!
The second startup gave me a time-series signal and I was asked to figure out whenever the washing machine was running. When you have electric signals, you can decompose them into fourier harmonics, & running the washing machine leaves a distinct signature - you'd get extra harmonics if you ran the washer.
The third one asked me to flag a bunch of potential delinquent borrowers from a 30-year home loan repayment schedule. Risk prediction
What kind of positions were you interviewing for? Did you get any offers? Frankly, as a webapp developer, those sound like some tough interview questions!
imho there's a lot of froth in the market. this has created a bunch of 1-st gen AI companies in SF with speculative business models who want data-scientists to essentially work miracles & find needles in haystack.
If someone had told me you could datamine electrical consumption from smart meters, figure out when the customer is running his washer-dryer, and ask the customer to reschedule his laundry routine for a slightly smaller bill so the utility company gets a smoother duty cycle throughout the day, and there was a business model in that, I'd be flabbergasted. And yet, it exists!
This grocery startup that employs essentially portfolio management theory to optimize cost given calorie consumption is not entirely fiction either.
There's a company that datamines historical MLS data joined with facebook data & predicts which customers are potential home buyers because they are having a "life-event" ( usually birth of kid, so need extra room ) & realtors cold-call these potential home buyers.
There's an airline that datamines flight paths of every pilot on its payroll ( essentially (x,y,z,t) coordinates at time t) and flags the dangerous/risky pilots ie. the pilot who is prone to choose those flight paths that bring him very close to another airline, thus creating potential collisions between the airplanes.
I've seen demos of all of the above & more. We live in very, very interesting times!
Everyone in this line of work (probably in every line of work) tends to compare their own abilities with others'. Frankly, I have no idea how I'd solve any of this unless you said 'Knapsack problem, figure out how to implement it' -- even then I'd have to go google stuff. Is this kind of stuff standard for higher level work?