I had an "implement binary search" interview once. I came away feeling like I was being interviewed for the wrong role. I don't understand how anyone could think that's an appropriate interview task for a DS position.
Implementing anything even a little tricky under pressure can be tough. unless you’ve practiced with bit or pointer twiddling regularly, you are mostly validating whether they did interview prep or not. That probably selects for more serious candidates, so it probably works. But i was tripped up by a simple binary search problem the other day, even after i’d just solved several harder problems quite quickly. It’s just the nature of algorithmic problem solving — until you’ve done a lot of prep, it’s dicey whether a novel problem will take me five minutes or five hours to solve.
Agreed. MLE in very ML-heavy companies tends to mean SWE who work on ML systems, and sometimes, that can mean as much working on stuff like infrastructure as modeling.
