ByteDance TikTok Researcher Graduate AI/ML Interview Experience

Please give me some points! Back in July, a HR representative from TT contacted me on LinkedIn and shared a referral link. I told her I was interested in either an SDE or MLE position in this group. A

Please give me some points! Back in July, a HR representative from TT contacted me on LinkedIn and shared a referral link. I told her I was interested in either an SDE or MLE position in this group. After she applied, I didn't hear back for several days, so I clicked the link again, but without carefully checking the name, I mistakenly applied for the Researcher Graduate position. Later, thinking that an interview would help me monitor my studies, and being too lazy to change the position, I went for the interview. The interviewer was a Chinese man, and he seemed very indifferent throughout, like he didn't care what I was doing. This is a backtracking LeetCode problem, actually one of the top 150 interview questions. I've copied it here: Given an array of distinct integers candidates and a target integer target ,

return a list of all unique combinations of candidates where the chosen numbers sum to target . You may return the combinations in any order. The same number may be chosen from candidates an unlimited number of times. Two combinations are unique if the frequency of at least one of the chosen numbers is different. The test cases are generated such that the number of unique combinations that sum up to target is less than 150 combinations for the given input. This was my first interview recently. When I saw this problem, I knew I'd done it before, but I kept forgetting the backtracking technique. After thinking for 10 minutes, I finally remembered and solved it. Then there was a 30-minute ml test. In the interview, I realized I lacked research experience. He asked several questions, the most memorable being about how to improve an agent's capabilities using a model—a rather open-ended question. I discussed some common fine-tuning methods like Rag, but he seemed dissatisfied with my answers, which is understandable given my lack of research experience in this area. I was

rejected the same day, which initially upset me, as I thought passing LeetCode was enough. However, after several more interviews during the fall recruitment season, I realized the market was vastly different from when I was looking for internships in 2022. Now, not only do you need to solve problems quickly and bug-free, but you also need to impress the interviewer in ML interviews. Even with your best efforts, a single weak link or a perfunctory interviewer who doesn't seem to like you can lead to failure. Please give me some points!