I read your tweets and totally agree that data science interviewing is really bizarre. I have a PhD and currently work as a principal data scientist at a large company, but I've been interviewing with some other companies and the interviews are outright strange.

I've had questions ranging from reversing strings on a whiteboard to checking for valid email addresses. I had another question about flipping biased coins and calculating probabilities. It's all nonsense and totally unrelated to the skills I developed during my PhD which primarily consisted of performing massive amounts of machine learning on high performance computing systems over large sets of data to extract important insights.

But — if solving these algorithm puzzles quickly and without errors is the key to a $300k+ job, so be it. I'll just practice this nonsense until I've optimized for the skill of "interviewing", and then maybe I can contribute in some kind of meaningful way to the company with actual data science.