It was an amazing building but the technical interview was not particularly useful. They rejected me after I got fizzbuzz wrong. Didn't even give me a chance to do it again.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at BlackBerry in May 2021
Interview
HR phone screen followed by a 1 hour interview with the hiring manager.
HR screen: Described position and a few details about background. Provided information on what to expect for the next interview with the hiring manager.
Hiring manager: Very focused on technical questions and no real discussion of my previous work experience or skills. Broken down into two parts. First 30 minutes focused on a wide range of questions on deep learning mechanics. Last 20 - 30 minutes were a coding challenge. Time provided was a bit short but question asked was fair (implement a common machine learning algorithm in python).
Overall, the interview process was more focused on detailed mechanics of neural networks than most I've been through. The interviewers were very focused on the technical and coding evaluation but were courteous and I think it was a fair assessment for the type of employee they are looking for.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Why did ReLU activation functions become more popular than sigmoid activation functions?
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at BlackBerry (Waterloo, ON) in Jul 2020
Interview
The process took a week from the email to set up a time for 1 hr interview with the hiring manager to the decision. I was an easy interview with 3 parts that covers your work discussion, general ML knowledge assessment, to python code and math questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can you tell us more about the ML projects that you worked on.
Data Scientist applicants have rated the interview process at BlackBerry with 3.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 25% positive. To compare, the company-average is 66.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Data Scientist roles take an average of 52 days to get hired, when considering 4 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at BlackBerry overall takes an average of 22 days.
Common stages of the interview process at BlackBerry as a Data Scientist according to 4 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 22%
One on one interview: 11%
Skills test: 11%
IQ intelligence test: 11%
Personality test: 11%
Presentation: 11%
Drug test: 11%
Group panel interview: 11%
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