It has been almost two weeks since I finished, and I have not heard anything, so I probably failed... This was the first interview of my job search, and I never expected to fall at the OA. Looking back, I did not take it seriously enough, did not prepare enough, and was not familiar with this OA format. There are many interview reports on the forum, so I am writing about a few things I had not seen before in the hope that they help everyone.
The OA had four questions. I prepared the house problem that people had shared on the forum, but I received the drivers-and-rides problem instead. One is classification and the other is regression.
The first question asked me to merge four rides CSV files and calculate three metrics. Be careful to convert the results to numeric values; otherwise, only half the tests pass. I suggest finishing this question in ten minutes, or time gets very tight later.
The second question tested a Python implementation of SQL manipulation. I had to merge two tables from the first question and calculate some new metrics. The prompt was very long, and the final result had to contain many columns, so you really had to read carefully. The date was not today; it was a particular day in 2023. I wrote a huge amount of code, but it did not pass the tests... I felt desperate and spent a lot of time debugging, but it still did not pass. I do not know whether I missed part of the prompt.
The third question covered feature engineering, fillna, and ordinal encoding. Pay attention to the difference between fit_transform and transform. The final output had to include two CSV files, one processed training file and one processed test file. I was not practiced enough at this, wrote half of it, gave up, and skipped directly to the last question.
The fourth question gave me training, test, and validation CSV files and asked me to train a regressor on imbalanced data. At the end, I had to assess it with precision and recall. Random Forest was enough for this one. It was very simple, and I passed it.
I think the hardest parts were passing the hidden tests and allocating time sensibly across four questions in 90 minutes. You do not actually need to finish all of them, but it is best to pass every test case for the first and second questions. Practice more before the assessment. Otherwise, seeing that time is running out while being unable to debug the problem really can make you fall apart.
I also strongly recommend looking up the original OA questions on RedNote and collecting interview reports from different sources before the assessment. Failing the OA before the campaign has even begun is truly unfortunate. Good luck, everyone.
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