Status: 2020 Grad , Normal Private College (Tier 3/4)
Current Company : Tata Power Ltd (Lead Engineer)
Company Interviewing: Cars24
Position they offer: Data Scientist
Location: Mumbai, INDIA
Date: Feb, 2022
Applied Thorugh : Referral
Rounds
- Home Assignment(3-4 Days)
- Technical Round 1(45 Min)
- Technical Round 2(60 Min)
- HR(30 Min)
Home Assignment
I saw a post on LinkedIn by one of the Staff Data Scientists of Cars24. I messaged him my Resume and a short message. He gave me the mail id of HR and I mailed my details and Resume to HR.
After 2-3 Days I got a call from HR. She asked me some basic questions and told me there will be Home Assignment and I have to submit by this weekend.
Home Assignment consists of one ML Use case and one Coding question.
Use case 1: Predicting Engine Rating.
Use case 2: Flights to Trip mapping using genetic code which can work for any number of connecting flights i.e. recursive merges.
I solved both the questions and shared the code files and Jupyter notebook to HR.
Technical Round 1
After 2-3 Days I got a call from HR, she told me there will be a Technical Interview based on the assignment solution you shared.
She scheduled Interview for next week. After giving a lot of interviews I am very confident that I will be able to clear this one.
On the Day of the interview, it started with "Tell me about yourself". After that he started with asking questions about the Assignment.
- Briefly describe your approach to this problem and the steps you took.
- How well does your model work?
- How do you know for sure that’s how well it works?
- What stats did you use to prove its predictive performance and why?
- What issues did you encounter?
- What insights did you obtain from this data? For example: What features are important? Why? What visualizations help you understand the data?
- What are some other things you would have done if you had more time?
Then he asked some basic ML questions. I used Regularization since my model is overfitting. He asked me about L1 and L2 Regularization.
Then He told me if I had any questions. I asked him about my roles and responsibilities in the company and Interview ended.
Technical Round 2
After 2 Weeks I got opportunities to appear for the 2nd Interview. Since there was miss communication between HR and Interviewer who took my first Technical Interview.
In this round the same LinkedIn Person whom I messaged in the start took my Interview.
He started with Explain any 2 Projects from your Resume.
I explained the projects and he asked me some clarifying questions in between of my Explanation.
In one of my projects I wasn't able to convince him of one of the features. He told me it does not make sense. I think I should prepare How to explain in layman terms. This was one of the negative parts of the Interview.
Then Interviewer asked me one Coding Question.
He given me one array:
arr = ['1','2',20,0.91, 0.77,'3','4']
He told me to sort the array but preserve the data type.
Solution:
print(sorted(arr, key=float))
The above will do the job but the Interviewer was looking for Implementation instead of direct function.
I started explaining to him my approach but he told me to write instead of talking.
He is not interested in approach, He wanted to see working code.
I came up with one solution but while implementing I am getting the wrong answer.
Interviewer told me he had limited time so he moved to ask if I have any questions.
I asked him about company work culture. While he was explaining I started debugging my code. I found the bug and fixed it. After the Interviewer finished answering my question. I told him that I corrected my code and now it is working. He told me to explain my code. I explained my code line by line. Then he asked me about my expected salary and if I have any offers in hand. I told him it is in the pipeline. Then he told me HR will get back to you and Interview ended.
I thought I cleared the interview since I am able to answer that coding question.
After 1 week HR didn't contact me. Then I messaged her, HR told me that she got negative feedback for my candidature.
Potential Reason of Failure in this Interview according me is as below:
- Hiring for that role is already done.
- I already have an offer and I have to relocate so it might be expensive to hire me.
- That one Negative part of that Interview where I am not able to convince about my Project.
Some times after a lot of effort you get failure but every Interview teaches a lot which can be helpful in other. So keep trying and keep hustling.
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Other Interview Experiences:-
EY: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418234/EY-or-Data-Analyst-or-Mumbai-or-July-2022-Offer
Capgemini: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418001/Capgemini-or-Data-Scientist-1-or-Virtual-or-Apr-2022-or-Offer
Tiger Analytics : https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418125/Tiger-Analytics-or-Analyst-Data-Scientist-or-Virtual-or-Sept-2021-July-2022-Rejected
Nagarro: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418273/Nagarro-or-Senior-Engineer-or-Mumbai-or-Apr-2022-Offer
Dream11: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418307/Dream11-or-Decision-Scientist-or-Mumbai-or-March-2022-Rejected
UBS: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2418165/UBS-or-Data-Analyst-or-Mumbai-or-May-2022-Offer