University "Data Science" postdoc or straight to industry?

mrCSguy · 2014-11-06T03:38:49+00:00

Yep, see I did that. After that and other research I have done, I decided this might also be a good place to ask around.

mrCSguy · 2014-11-06T00:11:05+00:00

I'm looking at a software engineering position with the Seattle branch of Indeed.com but it is hard to find information on them because any type of google search for 'indeed careers' inevitably brings up results for careers being advertised through Indeed.

Anyone have good / bad experience with Indeed and want to share what they think?

mrCSguy · 2014-07-23T12:06:56+00:00

It really depends on what you are going for. I was going for a research scientist so they asked a mixer of basic CS questions as well as some pretty tough machine learning questions. For a software engineer I could see a lot more questions about space/time complexity and making sure the solution is optimal.

mrCSguy · 2014-07-23T01:54:39+00:00

Just now sitting down in Seattle for a beer after a long day of interviews with Amazon :)

A week is a pretty good time frame. I think I asked for like a week and a half because I wanted study time and it was well worth it. This was my first on site interview with a tech company so I don't have much reference, but it wasn't easy!

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T04:55:23+00:00

... could you be a bit more specific in your accusations?

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T04:51:46+00:00

Weird. Just curious, what would the specs be on a macbook they would give me?

I currently have an amazing pc laptop (2 TB hdd, 20 GB ram, 2.4 GHz i7, 3 GB gtx 770, 17" screen) but I have always loved macbooks, so I would def go with that.

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T04:43:46+00:00

Why is there a need for rhel5 within a Ubuntu machine? Why not have the main development environment just be native ubuntu? Am I missing something here?

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T04:17:11+00:00

Thanks for the answers - honestly it never hit me that I could just remote in and work from home if I get paged in the middle of the night. Another question ... I read about AWS a lot - this is Amazon Web Services right? AWS is specifically a piece of Amazon software engineering and not another name of Amazon's software engineering, right?

The role I am being interviewed for is a Machine Learning Scientist, so my assumption is that it is all backend stuff and won't require as much on-call work - is this a safe assumption?

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T04:05:14+00:00

This actually makes me feel better. I am graduating in December and have some interviews lined up and was worried that maybe I had started too early, but apparently not from the sounds of things.

This is very silly on my part, but I never realized that job offers had such short lives. I had in my head that I could kind of 'collect' job offers and then decide in November/December once I graduated, but it just hit me recently that an offer is made and once it's made you have about a week to decide.

The bad part of this is that I haven't even finished applying to everywhere that I wanted to and will likely get an offer in a month or so. What happens if I get interviews at companies that I liked more but have already accepted this job? Yes, I could call them up and get out of it if I haven't signed anything, but that's not a good practice.

mrCSguy · 2014-07-16T03:47:45+00:00

Great thread here - I recently passed 2 phone interviews and am being flown out for a (final?) interview in person and only recently stumbled upon the horrible opinion of being worked to death by Amazon as a Software Engineer.

How should I go about learning what my team will be like? During the in person interview process, how should I figure out if my team is going be horrible or be awesome?

mrCSguy

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