If he really did take those and did all the assignments himself and understood all the concepts, that still puts him at least in the 95th percentile among ML job seekers.
But it shows intent for junior roles.
People have no idea how many people just put "AI enthusiast" on LinkedIn profile and start to seek ML roles.
I have had people only with Excel skills apply to ML roles.
And, true thing is every company’s ML tooling/stack/procedure is wildly different. One has to learn on the job.
(Shrug) I don't. Hustle gets rewarded, as usual. Sounds like he contributed at least as much value as he captured.
What in my comment gave you that idea?
Oh, and he didn't have to write any code during the interview.
You don't see anything wrong with that?
I think it's fine to hire a person who just took Coursera ML courses and passes the interview, but you would normally position the person to be a junior with senior folks overseeing his work.
Got a senior ML position in a well known Fortune 500 company. Senior enough that he sets his goals - no one gives him work to do. He just goes around asking for data and does analyses. When he left our team he told me "Now that I have this opportunity, I can actually really learn ML instead of faking it."
If you think that's bad, you should hear the stories he tells at that company. Since senior leadership knows nothing about ML practices, practices are sloppy to get impressive numbers. Things like reporting quality based on performance on training data. And when going from a 3% to a 6% prediction success rate, they boast about "doubling the performance".
He eventually left for another company because it was harder to compete against bigger charlatans than he was.