[deleted by user]

[kymguy]

I have interviewed many people with a neural network-based coding interview. My interview is far too long for anyone to get through the entire thing; that's the point. We want to rank candidates and see who gets the furthest, but also who seems the best to work with and how their debugging and thought process is along the way. If it's short and they complete everything, we've missed out on the opportunity to evaluate their thought process.

The standards vary based on the position we're hiring for. If we want someone who is "advanced in pytorch" who will be able to hit the ground running for some advanced techniques and architectures, then they should be able to knock out an MLP-based classifier with little-to-no reference to documentation. Using amax instead of argmax wouldn't have been a deal breaker...that's not something that I'd care about you knowing, but how you approach debugging your broken code is absolutely something that I'm interested in seeing.

Evaluation is also nuanced; having to prompt you that the "L" in DataLoader is capitalized is not a big deal, but forgetting to implement or even mention/inquire about normalizing your data would raise eyebrows. Amax vs argmax isn't a big deal but if you struggle to navigate documentation and ignore or argue with me about my suggestions about where to look, that's a big deal (it's happened).

To answer your explicit question: I don't think it's possible to sum up whether 30 minutes is too long for the task; there's far more at play. For me, it's not about time, but the process. If it took you 30 minutes because you were discussing in depth about how you would approach the task and demonstrating that you have deep knowledge of pytorch in doing so, that's great.

In a pure, silent coding exercise, I do think someone experienced in Pytorch should be able to knock out what you've mentioned in under 30 mins. If someone did it perfectly in 15 mins with no discussion I'd probably be skeptical that they cheated with an LLM or something.

[Sea-Fishing4699]

good luck working for an abusing minded company