The interview was conducted in Chinese. My interviewer was a staff data scientist on Tencent's North America team. Their team works on games — they even asked me what games I've played. The team covers both product DS work and modeling DS work.
They started by asking about the projects on my resume, then followed up with a few more questions about them. After that, they asked me this question:
Say you want to design an email with some links for users in a game — how do you determine the design of the email, like the number of links or the content, so that you minimize the chance it gets detected as a promotional email? Assume we can't get feedback from users, meaning we can't change the design after sending the emails and seeing whether it gets flagged as promotional. We want to make sure we have a good design before we ever send the actual emails.
If anyone reading this knows how they'd answer this, I'd love to hear it. At first I didn't understand the question and kept saying we'd revise the design based on user feedback after sending it out. The interviewer said we couldn't use user feedback at all — we had to get the design right before sending anything. In the end I said we could use historical data to predict the probability of an email getting flagged as promotional. I also asked GPT about it, and honestly it felt like it was just making things up too.
After that we were probably running low on time, so we moved on to coding. One question was SQL — use a window function to compute the cumulative sum of games played by a player, by date. The next one was to hand-write k-means in Python.
The interviewer said they'd get back to me with results in a week. In the end they never did. I'm speechless. This is the second company that's ghosted me like this. Honestly, what can I say — once they've hired someone, they just forget you exist.
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