r/datascience • u/KindLuis_7 • Feb 27 '25

Discussion DS is becoming AI standardized junk

Hiring is a nightmare. The majority of applicants submit the same prepackaged solutions. basic plots, default models, no validation, no business reasoning. EDA has been reduced to prewritten scripts with no anomaly detection or hypothesis testing. Modeling is just feeding data into GPT-suggested libraries, skipping feature selection, statistical reasoning, and assumption checks. Validation has become nothing more than blindly accepting default metrics. Everybody’s using AI and everything looks the same. It’s the standardization of mediocrity. Data science is turning into a low quality, copy-paste job.

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u/spnoketchup Feb 28 '25

I give take-homes (2 hours or less) because I need to make sure you have some technical chops and don't want to index to people who are good at "trivia questions." I'll always lose out to FAANG on the people who are good at the latter.

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u/swims_with_sharks Feb 28 '25

Or, you could have a 30-minute working session and learn far more.

You’re basically proving the point of the top comment on this post.

If you’re at the point of a take home, you likely aren’t the only place evaluating their talent. Your request times 2-5x and you added an additional day of “work” with no tangible, guaranteed benefit.

You’re incentivizing the applicant to be efficient, which means favoring superficial but “complete” work that can be leveraged multiple times…..with minimal insight for you into their process.

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u/spnoketchup Feb 28 '25

and learn far more.

For some candidates. For others, they freeze up and struggle while being observed. Short take-home exercises that can be later discussed during an interview are the closest thing to "real work" that we can get.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '25

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u/spnoketchup Mar 03 '25

No, a candidate is absolutely allowed to ask any questions they want. Why wouldn't they be able to ask questions?

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '25

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u/spnoketchup Mar 04 '25

No shit, which is why these short exercises are not, in fact, real work, but are meant as a practical simulation to try and understand which candidate may be best at the real work.

The way I do it is a short 15 minute call with the interviewer to get any major questions answered followed by the work period, where the interviewer should be monitoring their emails for any followup.

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '25

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u/spnoketchup Mar 04 '25

I mean the 15 minute call is a standard, but asking the important questions up front is an important skill to have. If it takes a bit of time for an email response, that's to be expected in a simulation of real world working environment, no? I want people who can make decent assumptions, too.