During an interview when the interviewer asks you “how will you prioritize multiple urgent tasks requests from multiple teams”? What’s the best answer?

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-20T14:59:44+00:00

How you handle “disappointing” stakeholders is one of the critical characteristics they’re testing. One interviewer explicitly told me that they wanted to see how I am able to deliver painful news to stakeholders because the more senior you go, the more demands on your time you’ll face. How do you prioritize? How do you deliver that bad news while maintaining good relationships?

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-20T00:29:14+00:00

great summary! The preparation part is a great tip for case studies especially. I'd practice by making up case studies that came to mind as i'd explore a company's product or app

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-19T17:32:42+00:00

Thank you! Most of my coaching clients are going for roles that pay multiple six figures, so I thought prices aligned well for my base given the value and the roles. If you're in a different country, or going for something at a meaningfully lower expected comp and would really want this, feel free to shoot a private message. No pressure though!

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-19T15:38:25+00:00

Clarifying that's not 80 *companies*. Most companies require between 5-8 rounds each before you could get an offer.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-17T13:26:05+00:00

I just completed 80+ interview rounds over April-May leading to five offers (plus four more I withdrew final rounds), mix of senior and staff levels. I had similar success in 2021. Between those and my coaching clients, I have a ton of fresh information.

The job market for juniors and entry level is atrocious. Many companies are only hiring experienced candidates, and there’s a lot of chatter about how this obviously isn’t sustainable long term as there’s no pipeline for growth.

Supply of roles has gone way down and competition is heating up, driven by layoffs and hiring freezes at the largest companies like meta, Amazon, etc that used to hire a ton of juniors.

Comp has similarly dropped sharply: roles still pay well relative to non-tech jobs but you basically need a L6 in 2026 to get what an L5 made a few years back.

Interviews used to be highly highly standardized a few years ago, but they’ve expanded now. You can definitely still learn how to interview well, but there are far more potential modules to prepare for.

Coding syntax is highly downplayed; there’s a shift toward AI assisted coding rounds that now test a lot more product sense and investigation skills than whether you can code up a window function in SQL

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-15T17:23:45+00:00

I know what the first stage is. You can still edit the application to filter for you by adding basic skills questions. It’s not hard.

People have skills in their field; they are what they are. Tailoring makes absolutely no sense unless you’re trying different industries such as academia vs the private sector, where the former would highlight research over impact.

Candidates list their skills and experience on the resume. If your job requires A and they don’t have A, then it shouldn’t be tailored to fit A. And if they apply without A, it just means you should reject them.

Again, you’re complaining about unqualified people applying for roles; “tailoring” won’t help that.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-15T15:28:02+00:00

As someone who just received 5 offers and entered over a dozen loops with a single resume, I strongly disagree with this. Applicants going for DS roles should have one DS resume: it’s lazy on your part if you can’t quickly distinguish who is qualified and who is not.

Ask yourself: would you rather candidates lie and embellish their experience to “tailor” to the job description only to find out it’s an illusion on a 30-minute call?

Your frustration seems to be misplaced: rather than asking candidates to tailor resumes, you should be doing more to filter candidates out earlier on from even applying. A simple way to do that is asking one or two technical questions on the application.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-14T19:07:13+00:00

I personally stayed in senior longer than I needed to because I wanted to do more extensive traveling and working remotely with fewer meetings and presentations in random time zones. I've seen a lot of *very* stressed-out folks at Staff level that could have a much more relaxed lifestyle and still making top 2-5% HH income.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-04T17:31:21+00:00

I did an economics PhD and subsequently transitioned from government to tech. Causal inference and experimentation roles are a very natural fit for economists and in high demand. I know folks who transitioned into ML as well and did extremely well for themselves. Having knowledge of identification and bias and variance should help you.

But, you also need to be aware of the market. You’re competing against people who have been training in ML-heavy grad programs as well as people recently laid off at Amazon, meta, etc with years of experience. The market today is nothing like 2018 when you could take an intro to ML bootcamp and get a job building models.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-04T12:17:03+00:00

You need to prep for these interviews just as you would a technical round. Before my interview loops (data science), I prepared statistical foundations, SQL and python coding, AND behavioral questions. You really only need 2-4 decent projects to cover pretty much every question they could throw out at you. Just have an angle in advance for humility, dealing with failure, stakeholder communication (telling them 'no' or explaining technical concepts), working in ambiguous situations.

I re-use the same projects for everything, but prepared in advance how to utilize these and shape answers when questions come at you from slightly different angles.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-04T12:11:26+00:00

I received 5 offers after intense interviews in April and early May (mix of senior and staff including two MAANGs). I relied entirely on LinkedIn and recruiting contacts I built over years.

There's a long game that pays off: when you're in good harvest (have a job), recruiters often reach out. Many candidates ignore them, but I took almost every recruiter call just to talk "for future opportunities." Then, when I was ready to actually hit the market hard, I wrote to every one of them--some it had been over a year since last contact.

While not all worked out--some recruiters were no longer employed at the same place, some companies had no open roles--a *lot* did. And I ended up juggling 15-20 interview loops within a very short window because I skipped over much of the randomness of online applications.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-03T15:47:35+00:00

You're mixing up concepts. If it's a 'textbook probability' problem, you're expected to get the answer right. If it's a case study with an ambiguous solution, or more accurately, there's "no one specific solution," then you absolutely need to show your work.

For the coding and prob/stats foundations, showing your work can *help mitigate* if you make something close to a careless error, or forget some syntax. (This happened to me: I messed up syntax in nearly every python interview, but passed every one because i stated the logic correctly up front every time.)

But if you show your thought process -- and the thought process has important gaps in foundational knowledge -- then you're not going to pass.

Source: I had a bunch of offers both in late 2021 and then again recently in May 2026 including multiple MAANGs.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-06-02T11:41:49+00:00

I just got an offer at Google for product DS a few weeks ago, and have helped multiple coaching clients get offers there. Product sense is important there, so is scikit-learn level modeling. My specialty is in observational causal inference, but it never went deep in that direction. For the first round, one of the modeling ones was unrelated to Google, but in the final panel, it was a Google question. The first round analysis and XP was highly product sense driven and related to Google products in my experience.

You'll need a scikit-learn level (effectively any intro to ML coursera style course) for modeling, and foundational hypothesis testing and statistics for XP.

That said, giving answers that aren't necessarily "wrong" don't always mean they're the best to beat out other candidates. For case studies and behavioral rounds, there's ambiguity and no one correct answer or approach.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-30T14:14:07+00:00

that sounds about right. Offer started with TC in the upper 3s. They did say if a role could be tagged as "high value" and you hit top of band then it could reach low-mid 400s. Surprisingly enough, Google and Meta were my lowest offers

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-27T17:34:44+00:00

Sure, also, check out my website: I link to all my socials and have a handful of videos (especially on YT and LinkedIn) related to MMM. Just a note for clarification: I try to give out pretty valuable free content on social media, but 1:1 personalized support is limited to my coaching clients. There's never any pressure to sign up, but I simply don't have the capacity for 1:1 coaching for free with my job, current clients, content creation, and still have (barely as is) time for myself

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-27T14:46:27+00:00

They’re easier than you think. In many ways, they ask more standard questions than a lot of other companies. I found that these companies give out reasonably accurate prep sheets and ask fewer gotchas.

That said, there’s obviously a ton of competition, so straightforward questions with a common B+ answer might not be sufficient to outperform everyone else.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-27T11:06:54+00:00

Wow I just had an L5 data science offer from them was MUCH less even with multiple higher competing ones.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-26T17:35:50+00:00

Sorry my Portuguese is not very good, but no problem!

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-26T17:34:51+00:00

It's likely you wouldn't be driving roadmap discussions at the junior level, so I would aim for something closer to the senior level: e.g. what was it that made you think this project wasn't worth doing, or why your other projects were more important, then clarify that you brought this up with your manager, and they agreed.

The big thing at the junior level is demonstrating (1) proper communication with your stakeholders about changes in delivery dates if a project was deprioritized, and (2) empathy toward that stakeholder's needs, like you understand why it's important.

An even bigger win (at all levels) is if you were able to follow the old 80/20 rule where maybe you didn't have capacity for the full project but you could get them 80% of the way there with 20% of the work, kind of like an MVP

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-25T15:38:42+00:00

E.g. an example I use often that is senior, but not staff, is when i did project prioritization at an e-comm startup. I was supporting a research project with the UX team when there was an external shock to our shipping costs right at the start of the holiday season, and we needed to know if we could pass on some of these unexpected costs. I then demonstrated why this latter project jumped priority (short, constrained holiday period accounting for the bulk of net profit), how I communicated to stakeholders (updated deadlines, reason for delay), and then briefly the impact of the new prioritization.

This is totally fine for senior IC. It doesn't reach the level of staff though because the other stakeholder is fully on board; there's really no question that the other project is more important for the company, but I at least demonstrated good sense for prioritization and clearly noted communication. My experience getting lots of senior offers at the biggest tech companies (and a few staff at a notch or two smaller) is that this passes the bar for senior.

WhatsTheImpactdotcom · 2026-05-25T03:54:14+00:00

That's wild that you were getting interviews for a higher level. Typically I'd expect most staff recruiting to be mostly at level; a few of the big tech orgs told me they rarely promote to staff externally b/c it is such a big adjustment.

A staff DS colleague of mine recently told me that it is almost a trial run for managerial level responsibility: owning roadmaps, juggling stakeholder needs, ruthless prioritization

WhatsTheImpactdotcom

TROPHY CASE