I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at SAP (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2017
Interview
I was contacted out of the blue by an HR person who I spoke with for 10 minutes. He only wanted to know whether I was a US Citizen, what my salary requirements, and whether I had a chance to read the job description.
My next contact was an email asking me to come in and talk to the hiring manager in person. I was given only his first name and last initial
So, I show up on interview day. The hiring manager shook my hand and introduced me to someone who he said would interview me. The interview was a typical algorithm oriented Data Scientist interview - no application knowledge at all - everything was just algorithm oriented. His accent was quite thick and I had trouble understanding much of what he was saying, although he seemed very unaware that his diction was wanting.
This interview ends. After sitting in the conference room alone for 15 minutes someone else shows up. Same thing - algorithms only. This person also had a thick accent which was very difficult to understand. Once again, they seemed unaware that they were pretty incomprehensible, so I'm sure they thought I was an idiot for looking blank whenever they asked me something...
After this interview ends, I am sitting alone in the room for 10 more minutes when the first interviewer shows up. He explains that the hiring manager (whom I have NEVER spoken to at this point, except to say hello,) was called into an emergency meeting and they would make a decision about the position and let me know later.
End of interview day.
The lack of professionalism here on the part of SAP is just staggering. The whole process was very strange - I'm left wondering if I was simply a "token US Citizen" they brought in to game the H1B Visa system or something. I doubt I'll get an offer, but if I do I will have to think twice about accepting...
I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at SAP (Walldorf, Baden-Wurttemberg) in Sep 2017
Interview
* fast reply within 2 weeks after sending the application
* very nice and professional contact with HR
* invited to short screening phone interview (~15min., "introduce yourself", got information about the position and application process)
* offline ML challenge, 1 week to solve, interesting and fun problem
* afterwards invite to 1 hour phone interview with 2 experts of the team, very nice guys, asked in detail about my previous ML experiences, gave a typical ML problem and asked how I would approach it ("what data would you ask for", "what model would you build", etc.)
* detailed questions about deep learning, e.g. properties of different activation functions, advantages/disadvantages of several methods etc.
* at the end we had a relaxed conversation about the team and the job
* 2 weeks after HR let me know that they are not considering me anymore
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why did you choose LSTMs instead of more basic RNN architectures?
I applied online. I interviewed at SAP (Berlín) in Jul 2017
Interview
First an interview with HR and only introduce myself, then give me a offline task to finish in a week. After I successfully finish my task, there was a skype technical interview with coding and machine learning question, which I found is meaningless for the coding interview.