The recruiter contacted me about a Data Scientist position and submitted my resume. First, I spoke with the hiring manager and then with one of the resident data scientists in two separate calls. I pass the telephone screens and get invited to an onsite interview. I get there, and the first two interviewers (same session) start asking me to type Unix commands. I'm thinking to myself, uh shouldn't I be explaining the details of a random forest to you? Then it hits me.... they are interviewing me for a Data Engineer position. Bait and switch. I then have a series of five interviews, all very easy questions about linked lists, depth-first searches, and some Python code to debug (Hint: it's a deep copy). Two of the interviewers were non-technical managers who couldn't hack it in Silicon Valley, so they returned to the NYT nest. For the duration of the afternoon, I was thinking to myself, man these people are jaded but certainly have no reason to be. The exception was a brilliant engineer from the Caribbean, and I was thinking okay, this is cool. His manager was present during this interview, and clearly he did not like the way we were bonding during a coding exercise on the whiteboard. As other interviewers pointed out, it's about liking you, and if one of them does not, then you're hit. As far as technical expertise, keep it in your head.