Strange company or wrong expectations? /u/Suspicious-Shower114 CSCQ protests reddit

I build machine learning models for applications to healthcare. It’s a mix of research, math, and data science.

I recently applied to this position of “Research Engineer: Applied Research” at a startup in the Bay Area. The requirements were: Pytorch, familiarity with deep learning techniques, diffusion models, transformers/ vision transformers and some other research stuff. I felt I could do the job, applied and got a call back too.

Everything was going well until the recruiter mentioned their interview process. They said they have a common process for SWE and ML research which was a bit worrying but I let him continue because at the end of the day we do some swe stuff too.

Here is the process: 1. Hacker rank screening (specifically mentioned two Leetcode hard level questions) 2. Coding interview 3. In person coding/systems interview Then if I did well they would put me into swe directly, if not I’d continue further. 4. ML round 5. Offer (? I was so blown away that my listening capacity stopped here I’m not sure if there was another round ?)

ML research engineer with just 1 round of ML?

Forget that, is leetcode HARD asked for this stuff too? I specifically did not choose software engineering and went into research because I like research more but this shit follows me wherever I go?

I’m not sure if I’ll use more than 10% of things I learn from LC in my day to day job. Going though other jobs I decided to study: Distributed Systems, Scaling, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, ETL, AWS, CI/CD Pipelines, MLFlow, CUDA, Domain specific things (CV, NLP), Finetuning LLMs, and now even Building agents, And all of this is over and above the basic stats + data science + traditional deep learning work I already do and know.

And the want to ask leetcode? Am I missing a huge important part? Are there any topics that would actually help me? I’m genuinely curious. If there are things I should know (I don’t because I’m not from a traditional CS background) please advice!

If not then why are they not testing relevant stuff? Or am I delusional and this is just how it is?

I build machine learning models for applications to healthcare. It’s a mix of research, math, and data science.

I recently applied to this position of “Research Engineer: Applied Research” at a startup in the Bay Area. The requirements were: Pytorch, familiarity with deep learning techniques, diffusion models, transformers/ vision transformers and some other research stuff. I felt I could do the job, applied and got a call back too.

Everything was going well until the recruiter mentioned their interview process. They said they have a common process for SWE and ML research which was a bit worrying but I let him continue because at the end of the day we do some swe stuff too.

Here is the process: 1. Hacker rank screening (specifically mentioned two Leetcode hard level questions) 2. Coding interview 3. In person coding/systems interview Then if I did well they would put me into swe directly, if not I’d continue further. 4. ML round 5. Offer (? I was so blown away that my listening capacity stopped here I’m not sure if there was another round ?)

ML research engineer with just 1 round of ML?

Forget that, is leetcode HARD asked for this stuff too? I specifically did not choose software engineering and went into research because I like research more but this shit follows me wherever I go?

I’m not sure if I’ll use more than 10% of things I learn from LC in my day to day job. Going though other jobs I decided to study: Distributed Systems, Scaling, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, ETL, AWS, CI/CD Pipelines, MLFlow, CUDA, Domain specific things (CV, NLP), Finetuning LLMs, and now even Building agents, And all of this is over and above the basic stats + data science + traditional deep learning work I already do and know.

And the want to ask leetcode? Am I missing a huge important part? Are there any topics that would actually help me? I’m genuinely curious. If there are things I should know (I don’t because I’m not from a traditional CS background) please advice!

If not then why are they not testing relevant stuff? Or am I delusional and this is just how it is?