Or you could just not spend more than 4-6 hours on the assignment. The role might just not be a good fit, right now. It seems strictly better to find that out in a work-sample challenge, than in an interview being asked to code radix sort from memory.
Even then, it’s sometimes hard to know how you’re supposed to be allocating that time.
Suppose the challenge is to scrape some movie reviews and cluster them. On the surface, this is fairly reasonable. If you’re familiar with some relevant concepts and libraries, it isn’t too hard to get something up and running. On the other hand, measuring document similarity is still an open research problem. Should I do something fancier than a bag-of-words representation? What about the clustering algorithm? Evaluation?
I should show some kind of result. Is a simple tSNE plot enough to cover “visualization experience required”, or do I need a GUI that lets people tweak hyperparameters?
Maybe this is a sanity check to make sure I can code, so I should focus on documentation and tests. Or maybe I should make the scaler incredibly robust and scalable, since they kept talking about Big Data?
This isn’t an insoluble problem. Companies just need to be very specific about what they expect and how it’s going to be evaluated. If the point is code quality or ML chops, come right out and say so.
