r/LanguageTechnology • u/Scary_Bookkeeper204 • 6d ago
"Assignments" from potential employers in Language Tech - is this normal?
Context: I come from a linguistics background and have several years of experience in my specialty within the field. I passed the first round of interviews for an EdTech learning company for a high-ish level role. They gave me an "assignment" to see how I would handle what I assume are issues they are facing regarding scoring, mapping of scores, comparisons, etc.
The assignment has multiple parts and I have been explicitly asked for all of my thinking regarding my choices--whys, why nots, deep explanations, etc. Essentially, they want me to show all of my steps.
I'm not even halfway done, and this "assignment" has taken several hours and is multiple pages.
Having not experienced this before, I'm concerned that this ask from the company is more so them fishing for information they can feed into an AI. Are assignments of this scale common within the EdTech and Language Tech arena?
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u/user221272 6d ago
It is a bit different here, as I am an AI research scientist.
In my experience on both sides of the recruitment chain, take-home assignments are heavy on the applicant, but this is the best way to evaluate if this is someone I would want to work with and to see how they think.
LLMs perform most of the daily tasks, like coding, so many previous interview tasks are becoming less and less relevant. Even the number of papers published at top conferences is not a good evaluation proxy anymore.
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u/Scary_Bookkeeper204 6d ago
This is really helpful! The company is Al-powered however AI itself isn't really needed for the assignment itself. Or rather, I don't need AI for any of the heavy lifting as of yet.
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u/stabmasterarson213 6d ago
Yeah they are having you work on one of their open problems and doing free consulting at that point
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u/el_cadorna 5d ago
This is unfortunately an increasingly common practice, which I despise because you never know if you're doing free consulting for the company. I'm saving those for a moment I'm truly desperate enough, my time is more valuable than this.
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u/Parking-Currency-854 5d ago
Take home assignments are fairly common but several hours of detailed reasoning feels excessive without clear boundaries. I'd ask about expected time commitment and how submissions are used
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u/Pupeliene_Travolta 5d ago
yes that seems like a lot to ask for an interview assignment, id be a bit wary too especially if its taking hours to complete
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u/NamerNotLiteral 6d ago
The last time I interviewed at an EdTech company, I also got a technical take-home assignment that took me about 4 hours (and I believe the people who got further in probably spent up to 8-10 hours on it, or were very intimately familiar with the material while I had to learn some of it on the spot). I could've spent another couple hours on it, but it paid below my expected rate and would've been more of a prestige thing.
Honestly, though, it could go both ways, but, if they're sensible and not completely incompetent they'll understand that data drift is a thing and as education and learning further adapts to AI whatever knowledge they got from you will become outdated, and it'd be better to hire you to keep things on track. If they don't understand that, then you probably don't really want to work there.
The amount of information they can get from one human labeler working for about a day (assuming they only use the best applicant's submission rather than confusing a model with multiple different approaches) is nowhere near enough to reliably post-train any modern AI system, IMO.