Data Interview Questions

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Write an SQL query that makes recommendations using the pages that your friends liked. Assume you have two tables: a two-column table of users and their friends, and a two-column table of users and the pages they liked. It should not recommend pages you already like.
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Data Scientist

Interviewed at Meta

3.6
1 Mar 2016

Write an SQL query that makes recommendations using the pages that your friends liked. Assume you have two tables: a two-column table of users and their friends, and a two-column table of users and the pages they liked. It should not recommend pages you already like.

You're about to get on a plane to Seattle. You want to know if you should bring an umbrella. You call 3 random friends of yours who live there and ask each independently if it's raining. Each of your friends has a 2/3 chance of telling you the truth and a 1/3 chance of messing with you by lying. All 3 friends tell you that "Yes" it is raining. What is the probability that it's actually raining in Seattle?
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Data Scientist

Interviewed at Meta

3.6
12 Sept 2013

You're about to get on a plane to Seattle. You want to know if you should bring an umbrella. You call 3 random friends of yours who live there and ask each independently if it's raining. Each of your friends has a 2/3 chance of telling you the truth and a 1/3 chance of messing with you by lying. All 3 friends tell you that "Yes" it is raining. What is the probability that it's actually raining in Seattle?

want you to write me a simple spell checking engine. The query language is a very simple regular expression-like language, with one special character: . (the dot character), which means EXACTLY ONE character (it can be any character). So, for example, 'c.t' would match 'cat' as the dot matches any character. There may be any number of dot characters in the query (or none). Your spell checker will have to be optimized for speed, so you will have to write it in the required way. There would be a one-time setUp() function that does any pre-processing you require, and then there will be an isMatch() function that should run as fast as possible, utilizing that pre-processing. There are some examples below, feel free to ask for clarification. Word List: [cat, bat, rat, drat, dart, drab] Queries: cat -> true c.t -> true .at -> true ..t -> true d..t -> true dr.. -> true ... -> true .... -> true ..... -> false h.t -> false c. -> false */ // write a function // Struct setup(List<String> list_of_words) // Do whatever processing you want here // with reasonable efficiency. // Return whatever data structures you want. // This function will only run once // write a function // bool isMatch(Struct struct, String query) // Returns whether the query is a match in the // dictionary (True/False) // Should be optimized for speed
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Data Engineer

Interviewed at Meta

3.6
22 May 2020

want you to write me a simple spell checking engine. The query language is a very simple regular expression-like language, with one special character: . (the dot character), which means EXACTLY ONE character (it can be any character). So, for example, 'c.t' would match 'cat' as the dot matches any character. There may be any number of dot characters in the query (or none). Your spell checker will have to be optimized for speed, so you will have to write it in the required way. There would be a one-time setUp() function that does any pre-processing you require, and then there will be an isMatch() function that should run as fast as possible, utilizing that pre-processing. There are some examples below, feel free to ask for clarification. Word List: [cat, bat, rat, drat, dart, drab] Queries: cat -> true c.t -> true .at -> true ..t -> true d..t -> true dr.. -> true ... -> true .... -> true ..... -> false h.t -> false c. -> false */ // write a function // Struct setup(List<String> list_of_words) // Do whatever processing you want here // with reasonable efficiency. // Return whatever data structures you want. // This function will only run once // write a function // bool isMatch(Struct struct, String query) // Returns whether the query is a match in the // dictionary (True/False) // Should be optimized for speed

Data challenge was very similar to the ads analysis challenge on the book the collection of data science takehome challenge, so that was easy (if you have done your homework). SQL was: you have a table where you have date, user_id, song_id and count. It shows at the end of each day how many times in her history a user has listened to a given song. So count is cumulative sum. You have to update this on a daily basis based on a second table that records in real time when a user listens to a given song. Basically, at the end of each day, you go to this second table and pull a count of each user/song combination and then add this count to the first table that has the lifetime count. If it is the first time a user has listened to a given song, you won't have this pair in the lifetime table, so you have to create the pair there and then add the count of the last day. Onsite: lots of ads related and machine learning questions. How to build an ad model, how to test it, describe a model. I didn't do well in some of these.
avatar

Data Scientist

Interviewed at Meta

3.6
9 May 2016

Data challenge was very similar to the ads analysis challenge on the book the collection of data science takehome challenge, so that was easy (if you have done your homework). SQL was: you have a table where you have date, user_id, song_id and count. It shows at the end of each day how many times in her history a user has listened to a given song. So count is cumulative sum. You have to update this on a daily basis based on a second table that records in real time when a user listens to a given song. Basically, at the end of each day, you go to this second table and pull a count of each user/song combination and then add this count to the first table that has the lifetime count. If it is the first time a user has listened to a given song, you won't have this pair in the lifetime table, so you have to create the pair there and then add the count of the last day. Onsite: lots of ads related and machine learning questions. How to build an ad model, how to test it, describe a model. I didn't do well in some of these.

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