On turning the tables during job interviews as you experience grows
Some time ago, I sat down with Leyla from the AI Guild to talk about my own Data Science path but also my experience in job interviews for data positions. Recently, as I’ve been interviewing for positions, I wondered how to find out some more sensitive topics. How is the company keeping it with diversity? Is diversity important for them and do they take active measures to increase e.g. gender diversity or do they just wish it would be better? Do they take ethical considerations into account when using machine learning or are they not aware of potential biases in machine learning applications? For me, these are issues that are important to me and I want to find out what stance my possibly future employer has on it. It’s hard to say to what extent they are absolute deal breakers, imagine for example a team where most team members, including the team lead, seem to be very aware of the possibility of biases and overall the company has strong values but then one team member proposes a rather questionable machine learning use case. Is this a deal breaker? I don’t know.
Either way, I prefer to find out about it before signing a contract. I currently don’t have a good set of questions specifically for these issues, I generally try to find out about this when asking about projects they work on. Do you have experience in asking questions regarding these issues? Or other concerns you try to check during the interview? Would love to hear your experiences and opinions!
P.S: We recorded the interview quite a while ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic started. My tip about going to meetups for networking thus became a bit more challenging. If you have some good tips on how to network while all events are online, let me know!
Resources for Data Science interviews mentioned in the podcast: DS Career Resources.