I had a chat with Karun, he's offering free 1:1s on Topmate.

Here are some notes:

Why MS > PhD

• didn't have research experience

Why CMU

• narrowed down DS programs, CMU, Stanford and Columbia

experience at amazon

• ships fast
• 6 weeks sprints
• documentation heavy, makes you more replaceable
• uses notebooks in DS team, python files in Applied Science team
• PiP culture
• shipping things on AWS is seamless

experience at walmart

• in e-commerce team, recommender systems, trying out LLMs
• behaves like a startup, mostly GCP
• issues with data, infra, etc.

SDE vs DS

• when you become SME, SWE isn't as fast-paced, do the same things, DS has something new every day
• SWE ships features a lot more, DS shipping model has a lot more failure rate, offline evaluation and metrics don't translate to online

Interview

• Coding (leetcode easy, medium)
• SQL
• Stats (A/B testing, hypothesis testing, p-values)
• ML (basics, assumptions, when to use, metrics)
• Deep Learning (based on what's on your resume and role)
• system design (case study)

LLMs

• good at reading research
• StackOverflow better than ChatGPT

It was great talking to a senior DS currently working in the industry.

Having access to mentors like this is really valuable.

I look forward to more sessions with him and other professionals on topmate.