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OkAssociation8879 OP t1_j69n96y wrote

Reply to comment by Featureless_Bug in [D] Interviewer asked to code neural network from scratch with plain python on a live call. Reasonable? by OkAssociation8879

It's definitely an easy question if it was a common question and hence featured on leetcode, where candidates would practice it before the interview.

Someone with 2 years of experience don't remember the knitty gritty maths to implement NN from scratch. This question is more suited for someone fresh out of college, in my opinion.

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Featureless_Bug t1_j69nsjq wrote

>It's definitely an easy question if it was a common question and hence featured on leetcode, where candidates would practice it before the interview.

I mean, if it was on leetcode, it wouldn't make sense to ask it in the interview, because then you will get prepared answers.

>Someone with 2 years of experience don't remember the knitty gritty maths to implement NN from scratch

If you cannot apply chain rule, your math is very weak. If your math is very weak, you probably won't be a great ML engineer. It's not that you need a lot of math, but you need a broad general understanding of what can work and what can't quite often, actually.

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xorbinant_ranchu t1_j69tasv wrote

Would be interested to know what kind of experience you have?

I think literally none of the ML engineers I work with (myself very much included) could pull a chain rule implementation out in 10 mins.

90% of this job is just finding an existing implementation of something to make work.

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OkAssociation8879 OP t1_j69oa79 wrote

You are right. Interviewers generally ask about backpropagation. They should definitely test me on neural network concepts. But do you not think, asking to code entire neural network from scratch was an overdo for the interview?

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